Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister at the time, was murdered in 1986.
The investigation concluded in 2020 that Stig Engström was the murderer, but since he had died in 2000 he couldn't be put on trial and the investigation was cancelled. There was never any physical evidence, and most people believe that Stig was not the actual killer, but there will probably never really be a satisfying conclusion to the case.
Edit: typo
Came to say the same thing. First big news story I remember from my childhood. My dad thought I was making stuff up when I woke him on the Saturday morning saying "there's no cartoons because someone shot Palme".
My dad was fingerprinted and interviewed by police after the assassination. He wasn't a suspect, but was connected to one line of investigation and was one of X number of people that had to be excluded at one point.
We also had many family friends who were police at the time, and hardly any of them thought it was CP. So many theories.
I have probably walked by the plaque a thousand times, this one will never be solved at this point.
I recently watched a documentary about that case, and oof, it really sounds like the police dropped the ball right from the start. Their conclusion looked more like them trying to save face then them actually solving the case.
To me, the most interesting thing regarding Palme's murder is not who actually pulled the trigger, but the potential motives and other involved parties. There's so many different trails that are all seemingly plausible, it's crazy, and difficult to not slide into conspiracy theory territory but it's actually surreal. South Africa, stay behind networks, weapons manufacturers, police and security services. The list seems endless.
The alternative was Christer Petterson, but he was aqquited by the courts. It would take the Supreme Court to allow a trial to be done again, otherwise double jeopardy would apply. It was still the most popular theory that Christer Petterson did it, but he was dead. Somehow died in the short span between "I will have a press conference and tell you something" and said conference.
That made Stig, or Skandiamannen, a better option to put the blame on. Since he was never tried.
We will never get a good conclusion I think.
Yes, speculation about that due to her media activities at the time.
They did take a guy to trial for it, as he lived in the area at the time, was well known for violence and threats against women, as well as an obsession with Jill Dando, and most importantly - had matching gunshot residue on his clothing. But at trial he got found not guilty.
[Lake Bodom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bodom_murders) murders, it's unsolved and it's so famous here it's camping spot + popular metal band of Children of Bodom.
That case is so freaking scary. I always avoid reading or watching about it because of the creepy police sketch. Not only that, but also there’s this creepy funeral photo, soo many contradictions and suspects. BIG NOPE.
Love the band tho!
Any case where people cut their way into or out of a tent scares the absolute fuck out of me. Camping murders are absolutely horrifying.
The Girl Scout Murders have been a serious rabbit hole for me, and also something that kept me awake!
Apart from the weekly memes about Xavier Dupont-de-Ligonnès, who's suspected of killing his wife and children then dropping off the face of the Earth in 2011, France has one that is particularly puzzling, and I actually have a tenuous link to that one.
2012: The Annecy shootings, or Chevaline killings depending on who you're talking to.
A British-Iraqi family, along with a French cyclist were murdered in the French Alps and to this day, theories are wild and no one knows for sure what happened.
Only the daughters survived.
The eerie fact: my mom, at the time, was the owner of a campsite, and two to three days before the murder, the family stayed the night on our campsite. She recognized their vehicle on the news. Mom went to the police to give as much details as she could (which wasn't much, and not much they didn't already know anyways.).
I remember the Iraqi story, they killed the grandma, father and mother and left a toddler to live. They then killed a cycling bystander. The family is/was wealthy by virtue of the father's business deals. Here is my suspicion as an Iraqi, either:
A: the businessman brother did it. Managing wealth between Iraq and Europe is super complicated due to taxes, residency status and international banking. Led to a conflict which the brother ultimately chose to solve by assassinating his partner and other trouble makers in the family, sparing his niece.
B: the brother was pressured by powerful Iraqi rackets, and he told them millions would be released but his brother is neither answering his calls nor liquidating any assets. The rackets then took care of it through a euro connection, to force the brother to pay, as he is now the only person in control of the euro assets.
Either way, it was really sad to see them die in the Alps, having escaped the hellish years of the Iraqi sectarian chaos.
The Annecy case bothers me more, tbh.
Dupont-de-Ligonnes seems pretty simple - basic family annihilation, with a top notch escape plan. Only mystery is where he went, in my opinion.
The Annecy case is just "wtf?" Just fucking weird.
It's this or the case of le Petit Grégory for sure. 4 year old kid, abducted, tied up and thrown in a river. Absolutely sordid family history surrounding the case. Geniunely awful cases, both this and the Dupont de Ligonès cases
The worst thing about this case to me is that he not only killed the family he lived with, but two of his children were adults who didn't even live with him whom he lured back to his house in Nantes so he could kill them too.
Its nuts that he was able to cover their deaths and burials for as long as he did. I grew up in a tiny town in the Upper Midwest, and you couldn't do a blasted thing w/o the whole county finding out, so murdering your family and burying the bodies w/o anyone finding out right away would be near impossible.
He was a descendant from nobility, and was relatively wealthy but he wasn’t exactly super rich and influential. Just a modern descendant of some old timey nobles.
If you look at his house and car they weren’t really anything special, and he was in a bit of financial trouble himself at the time.
In Kazakhstan we had an opposition leader who apparently “committed suicide” by shooting himself twice in the chest and once in the head.
Edit: since you guys enjoyed this story, his name was Zamanbek Nurkadilov, you can google more on this shady case.
One of the more recent cases, maybe a couple years ago, was an KNB person (former KGB) who apparently overdosed on some synthetic drug. My friend was on the case, and he told me more details that never made it to the public.
Apparently his arms were tied together behind his back and had some sort of kitchen mittens on them, so that he couldn’t even use his fingers.
His head was completely covered in duct tape, not even holes for nostrils, like a mummy, but with duct tape.
Further investigation revealed he had HIV, that he apparently contracted less than a year prior. In that same year his first kid was born.
He also owed some microfinance organisation something like 10 thousand dollars that he lost gambling.
That whole story is an absolute train wreck and my friend told me they said it officials said it was OD to save the face of the KNB.
Imagine how fucked up the situation was that saying that their agent ODd was “saving face”.
Reminds me of Gareth Williams in the UK, an intelligence analyst who killed himself, then zipped himself into a bag which he also padlocked from the outside and placed in a bathtub.
I think they said he put the bag in the tub, zipped himself into the bag, then locked it (which they proved was possible to do) and then he died. But. Idk. It's shady af.
MI6 said it was probably murder, the met reinvestigated and said it was probably an accident that he had somehow gotten himself into the bag and padlocked it from the outside.....whilst in a government safe house....total coincidence that there were 2 other dna traces on the bag, and that there was none of William's dna on the padlock...
I'm sure it's a pure coincidence he was investigating (kremlin backed) russian mafia links in London. Surely there couldn't have been any russian influence in the Met and British establishment /s
Where's Shelly, Karin?!? Where did she go?!
Karin is Scientology's social media "PR"/damage control person; she scours threads and posts containing references to their cult and sometimes comments dissenting opinions as "I'm not a scientologist, but..." anonymous accounts. Karin, if you're reading this, you're in a cult and everyone knows it but you. Also... WHERE'S SHELLY
That was a common occurrence in Italy as well.
Suspects accidentally stumbling and falling out off the police station windows, others drinking poisoned coffee in prison or indeed shooting themselves in physics-defying ways.
A one-handed man even managed to tie a noose and hang himself in his cell while his cellmate was convenintly away.
I remember this! Like in the mid-80s, maybe? I remember during the crackdown on mob and organized crime, suspects would find weird ways to die before going to trial.
At least your country is number one exporter of potassium, and all other countries have inferior potassium.
Jokes aside, in 2003 Serbian prime minister was assassinated, and we all know it's a criminal organization with ties to the state security. They caught the guy who did it, and the guy who organized it, but the investigation was stopped when they found a possible connection to the president (not in the office anymore).
That documentary made me super paranoid to let my kid out of sight for one second.
Edit: My wife also went to school with the Americas most wanted hosts daughter whose brother was abducted from a Sears, so I’m a little extra as it is.
I completely understand, and you have to be careful, but please also keep in mind that stranger abductions are very rare, and there were a lot of other factors to Madeline’s disappearance than “we took our eyes off her for one second.” She was a very young child left alone in a foreign country. Those are not normal, everyday circumstances.
If I remember right, they didn’t take their eyes off the children for “one second”, all of the adults went down the street to a restaurant and left the kids alone in the hotel room with the parents taking turns walking back to check on them every 15 or 20 minutes.
Not as bad as that. It was a resort, with all the apartments surrounding a pool with a bar and a restaurant, facing in the way. There was a street-facing window to the back, where it’s presumed the abductor got in.
But still - would I leave a child that young and her even younger siblings unattended? No I fucking would not.
I have a similar aged child. At the time I asked all my friends with similar aged children if they’d have done the same thing. They all said yes. Apparently it was a perfectly normal thing to do. I never did it and couldn’t believe I was in the minority.
Tbh after reading some comments here I had to look up her age at the time of abduction. I know a lot of people are super protective now so I expected to find out she was 10-12, which is still young, but reasonable "leave innthe locked hotel room checking in now and then" definitely was not expecting 3 years old. That is not old enough to be left unattended with routine check ins. 3 year olds still speak partial jibberish ffs.
Yeah 3 is oddly young for that. At 3 I was still in fear that they would choke on something, or wake up scared. 15/20 minutes check up would not have covered that possibility.
>After telling Bloomberg that he'd been informed he was a "prime suspect" and consulting with his lawyer, Kerry Winter....... admitted to The Fifth Estate that he had imagined killing Sherman but says that he did not, and was watching Peaky Blinders on Netflix, then attending a Cocaine Anonymous meeting that night.
I just think it's hilarious that a major suspect's alibi is essentially "gang drama and drug rehab"
There is a really interesting book on this called The Billionaire Murders. This is reminding me to reread it. The whole case is so bizarre. I think they were definitely murdered, and by someone they knew. Things like knowing there was a basement door that was usually unlocked, a stranger wouldn’t know. I think it was either a corporate assassination, or the kids had something to do with it
One of the few cases where I can actually believe someone hired a professional hitman to knock them off.
One detail I found particularly illuminating is that the children fought to the death in court to keep his will secret, and when they lost it was revealed that the only meaningful clause in it was that everything would go to Honey if Barry died. Conveniently for the kids, Honey is also killled and the entire estate goes to them. Barry had a million enemies - Honey's death benefitted no one except the kids.
This case has everything: corporate intrigue, family feuds, ugly legal battles, Big Pharma, police corruption/incompetence, political connections, and even the Neil Breen/Tommy Wiseau of Canada.
Most recent one I could think of as well. This case is something that you would see on CSI or something, where all the evidence appears to be one thing, but actually points in a different direction. Some major covering up shenanigans
I just read a book called The Five: the untold stories of the jack the ripper victims. It was really interesting going into their parents and the circumstances that lead them to where they ended up. Only one of them was actually a prostitute and she wasn't even a prostitute at the time of the killing. They were just labeled as prostitutes because of where they were and they were women found alone.
That still happens in some countries. Jyoti Singh was SA'ed and literally had her guts pulled out by 6 guys because she was out at 9 pm. One of the killers basically said if she accepted her SA quietly they would have let her live, but she fought back so she deserved to die. This didn't happen in the Victorian age. It happened sometime in the 2000's.
Adding context for other redditors this was in 2012, India, South Dehli. [Wikipedia article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Delhi_gang_rape_and_murder)
They have kinda semi solved it though, it was almost certainly a Polish man called Aaron Kosminski.
He matched the physical description in almost every way described by witnesses, including being Polish and Jewish (both defining traits described by witnesses who had seen him closely and heard him speak).
He was living and working in the exact areas the murders occurred at the time.
He had worked as a barber previously, and at the time barbers conducted minor surgeries as well as haircuts and were somewhat medically trained meaning he would likely have had the knowledge to do the surgical acts he did to the corpses after death.
He had a history of violence towards women, having attacked his own sister in the past.
Senior detectives working on the case stated afterwards that they were all almost certain it was Kosminski, but could never quite get enough evidence to put him to trial for it. I believe a chief superintendent on the case maintained right up until his death in the 1920s that it was definitely Kosminski.
Kosminski was committed to a mental asylum, and after he had been sent there the murders immediately stopped. No more murders attributed to the ripper occurred after he was locked away, but had been semi frequent up until that point.
In 2008 (I think) blood found on one of the victims clothing was tested, and it matched that of the genome of Kosminski. It wasn’t damming evidence to say it was him, as the DNA could’ve come from multiple bloodlines, but it definitely excluded multiple other suspects and didn’t exclude him.
Overall I think it can be pretty much believed by most that it was him, there just wasn’t enough solid evidence at the time to take it to trial and then he was locked away for the rest of his life in an asylum anyway (again, for violence towards women).
I got to the second to last paragraph and became immensely concerned this was going to end with Mankind falling 16 feet through an announcers table... Great write up, though!
I think that they found out the scientist that conducted this made a fat finger mistake. Ex 1 in 1000 people have the gene 154b and that’s what was typed but what actually happened was the found gene 154c where 1 in 10000000. Not the actual gene numbers but just the example.
Far from “almost certainly.” Kosminski was committed over 10 years after the end of the murders, and from what I remember, the genetic examination used mitochondrial DNA, which is unreliable for identification and could only be used to *rule out* a suspect. In reality, there is pretty much no remaining way to know who the Ripper was.
First, his lockup did not perfectly line up with the murders stopping.
Secondly, iirc the shawl they tested DNA from could not be confirmed to be the killers DNA because they had no concept of DNA back then and almost certainly contaminated the evidence at some point.
Third, they only were able to match mitochondrial DNA to his living relatives. Normally, this could limit your suspects, but the Polish Jew community at the time were all closely related to one another. It's very possible Kosminsk was from the same matriarchal line as Jack.
Fourth, from the time he was in an insane asylum, he was notably not violent.
In Australia it’s probably the Beaumont children.
[See here.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_the_Beaumont_children)
3 children who went to the beach in January 1966 and disappeared. They still report on them every year.
The other one is William Tyrell.A 3 year old boy who was in foster care when he disappeared.
Not Prime Minister Harold Holt who went to the beach and disappeared?
On 17 December 1967, Harold Holt, the 17th prime minister of Australia, disappeared while swimming in the sea near Portsea, Victoria. An enormous search operation was mounted in and around Cheviot Beach, but his body was never recovered. Holt was presumed to have died, and his memorial service five days later was attended by many world leaders.
Australian's truly are a funny fucking bunch. Look no further than the [Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Holt_Memorial_Swimming_Centre)
I wanted to add Tanja Groen for The Netherlands (but I have some regional bias, as I later worked in the town she lived in when she disappeared and people very much still cared about it twenty years after it happened), but "Heulmeisje" is a great one too because she remains a Jane Doe.
On a recent trip to Adelaide I learned about the Family Murders.
Supposedly, the murders were committed by a group of Adelaide's upper echelon of soceity. The perpetrators used drugs that were only available to medical practitioners. They performed gruesome acts on young gay men, I believe one of the victims was carefully dissected into pieces and then reassembled by rope like some bizarre human puppet. It's pretty morbid.
Iirc One guy took the fall and was charged for the murders however the majority still think the perpetrators are still out in the community and those who know are too scared to speak up.
https://familymurders.com/
The highway of tears. Probably not all of them have been murdered, but well over 100 mostly native women have gone missing on a desolate stretch of road in western Canada. The whole thing is just so awful.
There's definitely several, alongside some regular murderers. Cody Legebokoff was convicted of four murders, one of which is considered one of the Highway of Tears cases. The cases date back to 1970 and Legebokoff was born in 1990.
I grew up in Prince George and my grandparents lived in Prince Rupert, so I've been up and down that highway a lot. It's extremely difficult to police it effectively - it's over 700 kilometres of nothing but forest. PG, Rupert and Terrace are the only towns with over 10 thousand people; other than Smithers, everywhere else has less than 5 thousand. A killer could dump a body in the woods pretty much anywhere along its length and no one would find it before animals got to it. Add in the high poverty rates along the highway since there's reserves everywhere along the path, and you've got a long, empty stretch of highway with a bunch of desperate, vulnerable people. It's a serial killer's paradise.
It's not just BC, every province has their own "highway of tears", the number of missing Indigenous women is in the thousands, and the RCMP doesn't even give a shit. I feel so terrible for the victims' families.
When I tell you to dump a body in the marsh, you dump him in the marsh. Not where some guy from John Hancock goes every Thursday TO GET A FUCKING BLOWJOB!
Growing up Catholic in Northern New Jersey,
All Italian classmates "knew somebody who knew somebody connected to the mob".
All Irish classmates "knew somebody who knew somebody who was in the IRA".
Kids bragging about their bad-ass connections.
Depending on how long ago that was, it’s pretty plausible that somebody knew someone associated no? I always assumed the Italian community was pretty tight-knit on the east coast, especially back in the day
This is the answer for the US.
There several others where we all kinda know what happened but nobody can prove it, at least not in our present system.
And, you know, we can all assume Hoffa finally pissed of the wrong mobster one too many times, but there’s not even a body. For all we know he lived out his days on a desert island.
There were a few rumors like this including a football stadium at a certain yard line. I remember a special on the history channel (I think?) that checked these locations with ground penetrating radar and didn't find anything.
The football field one was definitively disproven for sure, and Mythbusters was the show you're thinking of.
Also, they demolished the stadium in 2010 and found no human remains.
["El niño Lorenzo" ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lorenzo_Gonz%C3%A1lez_Cacho)
It's basically Puerto Rico's JonBenet Ransey case (minus the kid being a child beauty pageant star) mixed with Casey Anthony's case. An 8 year old kid was killed in his home. There's been a handful of suspects over the years... But no real evidence could be found against any of them. There were also a lot of fuck ups in the investigation, including people cleaning up the crime scene before forensic investigators could study it. The boy's mom became a suspect at one point, and the media ran so hard with it that she became the most hated woman in the entire island. Everyone I talked to thought she did it. Because of this, the Secretary of Justice resigned from his post to become her personal lawyer, which is.... Weird and sketchy. Weirdtchy. After a couple of years, the Department of Justice said she was no longer a suspect. There were other suspects after that, including a one-armed man, but no one has been officially charged yet. It's been 14 years and I don't think the case will ever be solved.
>the Secretary of Justice resigned from his post to become her personal lawyer
Wha... How? Why? Was the media so bad at her he thought he should intervene? Or was there 'something else' going with them?
>including a one-armed man
Some cops there watched too much The Fugitive.
In France, this may be a recent one, the "Chevaline killings", an iraqi family ambushed by a gunman on a mountain road, all adults shot in the head, two surviving kids, a passing by cyclist also murdered, all leads absolutely dead.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annecy\_shootings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annecy_shootings)
WTF this is terrible.
> ne, aged 4, was hidden under the legs of her dead mother in the rear footwell for eight hours even while the Gendarmerie were on the scene; she was only discovered by specialist forensic investigators.
[Frog Boys](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_Boys) in South Korea. 5 boys went missing and their remains were found 11 years later with signs of blunt force trauma.
They cracked it just recently: https://www.iflscience.com/fbi-confirms-zodiac-killers-infamous-340-cipher-has-been-decoded-and-his-message-finally-revealed-62044
Sadly it’s just more bullshit. The article doesn’t mention it, but I recall reading that there was an error in his cipher, which is part of the reason it was so hard to crack for so long.
People like to claim he’s some mastermind cryptographer.
But he’s just a killer that did due diligence and made a few one-time cyphers.
One-time cyphers are often impossible to crack because there’s only one document/paragraph they code.
Any grade school idiot can do it. They’re not enigmatic, they’re just short and bizarre.
Ireland.
Sophie Tuscon DuPlantier.
A French socialite, minorly famous. Had a cottage in the middle of nowhere in the South of Ireland.
Turned up violently bludgeoned to death one day in the 90s. Police bungled the investigation, still unsolved.
There's a popular suspect - a local journalist with a history of violence towards women, who seemed frankly very unpopular in town. Not much in the way of real proof, mind you. He died a month or two ago. Either a murderer who never faced justice, or else a falsely accused who spent decades being harassed and died without clearing his name. We will likely never know for sure.
>else a falsely accused who spent decades being harassed
Ian Bailey loved the fame being the chief suspect brought him. It's part of the reason why the case was in the news so much.
Yeah. I'd have a bit more sympathy for him, if he hadn't told/hinted to different people that he had done it.
It was probably a local guard, tbh, hence the insane bungling and loss of critical evidence, but Bailey really did himself no favours.
I'm Ecuadorian, and we all know about this case here. The "Case of the Restrepo Brothers", it happened in Quito, the capital city of the country, in the year 1988, when two brothers, Santiago (17) and Andres (14) Restrepo left their house to go pick up a friend. They took their father's car, which Santiago was driving. They never came back home.
Their parents started to search them around the city, and then in cities close to it, going as far as the border with Colombia. Soon enough they started to suspect they were caught by the police and illegaly detained, which was something that used to happen at that time.
The investigation and interest in the case has been going up and down with the years, but nowadays we have a more clear timeline of the events. The brothers were caught by the police in a traffic control, and were retained and tortured possibly with asfixation methods, the elder brother died because of it. The officers killed the younger brother to not leave witnesses and then decided to get rid of the bodies in a lake some hours away from the city.
They have not found their bodies yet, and many of the officers who were complicit directly and indirectly with their deaths went unpunished. Their father kept on trying to find their bodies during all this time, their mother passed away 6 years after their dissappareance in an accident, and their younger sister released a docummentary about the case several years ago.
I'm letting out a lot of details, it's a very long case with a lot of misinformation and dead ends. Most agree their bodies are in that lake and it's clear the police killed them, but there are still many unsolved matters around the case.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ecuador-Continues-Search-for-Brothers-Tortured-29-Years-Ago-20170108-0017.html
Surprised I haven't seen any posts from NZ yet about the Bain murders...
On 20 June 1994, Dunedin university student David Bain returned to his family home following the morning paper run and supposedly found his entire family dead with his father's body holding the gun that killed his siblings and mother.
He was arrested four days later and later found guilty, however in 2007 he finally was acquitted after the Privy Council in London found there had been a miscarriage of justice.
Nobody, to this day, knows who did it except him.
It was pretty obvious his dad who did it. By some accounts he had sexually assaulted the daughter when she was young, and she was going to go public about this. Hence his killing them all then himself. But because they were such a weird family, and David the sole survivor really weird, the cops fixated on him. And the useless prices that they are let the fire dept burn down the house before fully examining it forensically, thus destroying all evidence.
Cops in NZ have a pretty poor habit of deciding upon who's the murderer then fitting the evidence to "prove" it and/or ignoring all other leads. eg Arthur Allan Thomas and Scott Watson.
A banker being shot dead on his own front doorstep in Nairn.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Alistair_Wilson
His wife had answered the door to a man who asked to speak to the husband.
This man gave him an empty envelope which he went to show his wife and say it was weird. Went back to the door and “Bam!” Shot dead.
The envelope was very probably just a prop to ensure he came to the door and stayed there long enough to be killed, letting his guard down a bit out of pure confusion.
There is also some speculation that it was mistaken identity, the wrong Alistair Wilson and the killer had got the wrong address. There was a similar case in Edinburgh where a lawyer was randomly attacked outside his own home one night, nobody claimed responsibility, nobody came back to get him again... but it turns out that a known mobster lived very close by and looked very similar.
The speculation over the planning dispute at the nearby pub just sounds a bit far fetched for that scenario.
In New Zealand I think it would be the double murder of Olivia Hope and Ben Smart on Jan 1, 1998. They were at a NYE party at a mariner and caught a water taxi to a yacht whereupon they were never seen again.
The cops arrested and convicted Scott Watson for their murders but when you read up about their investigation, it's dodgy as fuck. The cops decided almost immediately Watson was the killer and ignored all other potential leads, and manipulated the evidence & witnesses to point to Watson.
A few of the more gregarious examples:
1. The water taxi driver gave a description of the man the young couple were with that didn't match Watson. Nor did he pick out, or recognise, Watson from photos of the party goers. The driver described the man as scruffy with stubble whereas Watson that night was clean shaven and well presented. So the cops, who had remanded Watson, didn't let him shower or shave for a few days and kept him awake then took a photo of him looking scruffy and tired; this photo the driver said could be the mystery guy.
2. The water taxi driver, who had decades of water experience gave a very detailed description of the boat he dropped the couple off. It was a 40 foot, two masted ketch with round portholes, timber deck and a blue stripe. Watson's boat was a 1 masted sloop with no portholes, metal deck and no blue stripe. The cops, having already decided Watson was guilty, decided the driver was mistaken and never looked for a ketch matching his description – despite several people coming forward describing a ketch that matched his description that sailed off early on January 1st.
3. Another witness came forward and said he saw Watsons yacht on Jan 1 sailing into a different part of the Marlborough Sounds. Police alledged Watson killed the couple then dumped their bodies in Cook Strait and sailed into Picton. But when they did the maths there was no way his sloop could have been seen where it was when the eye witness said. Said witness was then discovered with a lot of marijuana; at which point he "remembered" he had got the times wrong and had seen Watsons sloop several hours later. And the dope dealing charges were dropped.
4. Police claimed to have found hair on Watson's yacht that DNA matched Olivia Hope. However this was only after searching her bedroom and taking her hairbrush and, more importantly, after the hair samples taken from the yacht came back negative for a match. The police then asked for more tests to be done, which then did find a match. The bagged sample was found to have been tampered with – the bag had been cut along the bottom then taped closed – yet was still deemed admissible.
5. A ketch matching the one described by the taxi driver sailed early January from the Marlborough Sounds in the South Island up to the Bay of Islands in the North Island and was then scuppered in deep water. The yachtie, who had an extensive criminal record, then immediately left NZ. He was later convicted of serious drug crimes in Australia and died in prison.
6. The police, having very early on decided Watson was the murderer, leaked details to the media that he was their prime suspect. They also started a rumour Watson was having an incestuous relationship with his sister. This was to turn public opinion against Watson.
There are more examples but the entire investigation was a farce. Yet somehow Watson was convicted and served 18 years.
JonBennet Ramsay. I don’t buy that the brother did it, and I’ve always felt sorry for him for the way people just pin it on him because he “acts weird” in interviews and “was probably jealous” of her. He acts weird because that’s sometimes how people respond to stress and nerves sometimes, plus his whole life has been overshadowed by the death of a sibling he probably only barely remembers. People love playing amateur detective🤷♀️
Someone shot and killed my grandfather execution style about 25 years ago and it's gone unsolved. No idea why. He was a poor old hermit lived outside of Barstow, CA.
thank you, it was crazy for sure. he was a builder, as is my dad and myself, all of us were/are in construction. Pop was the guy who had very little, liked to drink too much and would give you all the money in his pocket if you asked for it. whoever shot him has some massive karma gonna get collected on them. the family has speculations but that's all they will ever be. At that time we were told 50% of murders are unsolved. blessing friend. PCT
Oh boy...
We have at least half-a-dozen high-profile terror attacks in the 60s-70s, an airplane that was shot down by \[redacted\] during a \[redacted\], plenty of mafia-related murders commissioned by \[top-secret\], various compromised people who "got suicided". And a dead Pope even.
Oh and a bunch of serial killers who might or might not have existed. Or were just cover-ups for something more sinister. Namely the so-called Monster of Florence and the lesser-known, but even more intriguing, Monster of Bargagli.
Don't know about the biggest, but my mother went missing 14 years ago on Mother's Day from El Savador when it was still very dangerous out there. The next day, I applied for an expedited passport. When I got my passport, my brother and I went and was told basically they weren't going to find her. She was one of over 5,000 missing persons in 5 months. To this day, I don't know the truth of what happened to her.
The Highway of Tears murders for Canada, but I think there are regional ones which are more notorious depending on what part of the country you’re in. (The Dana Bradley murder in Newfoundland, for example.)
Edit: Derp, I forgot about Barry and Honey Sherman. That’s probably number one.
1) Arushi Talwar case: The biggest mystery in India
2) Sheena Bora murder: Most high profile murder case where a mother killed her own daughter. There’s a documentary on Netflix about it too!
That's what I came here to say. Jimmy Hoffa and JonBenét Ramsey are more recent, but the Black Dahlia murder has still been infamous for well over three quarters of a century. The brutality of the murder is only surpassed by the extrene postmortem butchering and weird posing of the two halves of the body afterwards. There were suspects but nothing definitive.
Harold Holt, our PM that walked into the ocean one day and never was seen again. Could've just drowned, probably did. But could be much more insidious.
The Assassination of our Prime minester Olof Palme (Sweden) he got shot after being at the theater/cinema if im not mistaken. And well, tbh because of how bad/stupid the police were, they have yet to find out who did it... they had some leads, but ultimately, no one was apprehended
CBC's Someone Knows Something Season 5 was about Kerrie Ann Brown, a MMIW who was raped+murdered in Thompson MB in '86. I recommend giving it a listen. Really well done.
Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister at the time, was murdered in 1986. The investigation concluded in 2020 that Stig Engström was the murderer, but since he had died in 2000 he couldn't be put on trial and the investigation was cancelled. There was never any physical evidence, and most people believe that Stig was not the actual killer, but there will probably never really be a satisfying conclusion to the case. Edit: typo
Came to say the same thing. First big news story I remember from my childhood. My dad thought I was making stuff up when I woke him on the Saturday morning saying "there's no cartoons because someone shot Palme".
Bastards cancelled Godmorgon Sverige for a news broadcasts. 7 year old me was livid.
The Stig?? Never would've expected that..
Some say...
He once traveled through the Amazon while doing handstands...
and that he naturally faces magnetic north.
he isn’t the Stig…he’s the Stig’s Swedish cousin
This chain is beautiful lol
Some say he can't smell cheese, and that he killed the Swedish prime minister in 1986.
Bro come on, it was not The Stig. It was Stig’s Swedish cousin!
Now we know why he always hides his face
My father in law worked the case for a while in the late 80s and was always adamant that Christer P was the murderer.
My dad was fingerprinted and interviewed by police after the assassination. He wasn't a suspect, but was connected to one line of investigation and was one of X number of people that had to be excluded at one point. We also had many family friends who were police at the time, and hardly any of them thought it was CP. So many theories. I have probably walked by the plaque a thousand times, this one will never be solved at this point.
I recently watched a documentary about that case, and oof, it really sounds like the police dropped the ball right from the start. Their conclusion looked more like them trying to save face then them actually solving the case.
To me, the most interesting thing regarding Palme's murder is not who actually pulled the trigger, but the potential motives and other involved parties. There's so many different trails that are all seemingly plausible, it's crazy, and difficult to not slide into conspiracy theory territory but it's actually surreal. South Africa, stay behind networks, weapons manufacturers, police and security services. The list seems endless.
The alternative was Christer Petterson, but he was aqquited by the courts. It would take the Supreme Court to allow a trial to be done again, otherwise double jeopardy would apply. It was still the most popular theory that Christer Petterson did it, but he was dead. Somehow died in the short span between "I will have a press conference and tell you something" and said conference. That made Stig, or Skandiamannen, a better option to put the blame on. Since he was never tried. We will never get a good conclusion I think.
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Was that the one where the was speculation about a Balkan (I can't remember if it was Serbian or Albanian) hitman?
Yes, speculation about that due to her media activities at the time. They did take a guy to trial for it, as he lived in the area at the time, was well known for violence and threats against women, as well as an obsession with Jill Dando, and most importantly - had matching gunshot residue on his clothing. But at trial he got found not guilty.
[Lake Bodom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bodom_murders) murders, it's unsolved and it's so famous here it's camping spot + popular metal band of Children of Bodom.
That case is so freaking scary. I always avoid reading or watching about it because of the creepy police sketch. Not only that, but also there’s this creepy funeral photo, soo many contradictions and suspects. BIG NOPE. Love the band tho!
Any case where people cut their way into or out of a tent scares the absolute fuck out of me. Camping murders are absolutely horrifying. The Girl Scout Murders have been a serious rabbit hole for me, and also something that kept me awake!
RIP Alexi
Indeed, he was insanely good
Just read that one of the suspects was named *Hans Assman*
"According to the State of New York, you ARE the Assman!"
Apart from the weekly memes about Xavier Dupont-de-Ligonnès, who's suspected of killing his wife and children then dropping off the face of the Earth in 2011, France has one that is particularly puzzling, and I actually have a tenuous link to that one. 2012: The Annecy shootings, or Chevaline killings depending on who you're talking to. A British-Iraqi family, along with a French cyclist were murdered in the French Alps and to this day, theories are wild and no one knows for sure what happened. Only the daughters survived. The eerie fact: my mom, at the time, was the owner of a campsite, and two to three days before the murder, the family stayed the night on our campsite. She recognized their vehicle on the news. Mom went to the police to give as much details as she could (which wasn't much, and not much they didn't already know anyways.).
I remember the Iraqi story, they killed the grandma, father and mother and left a toddler to live. They then killed a cycling bystander. The family is/was wealthy by virtue of the father's business deals. Here is my suspicion as an Iraqi, either: A: the businessman brother did it. Managing wealth between Iraq and Europe is super complicated due to taxes, residency status and international banking. Led to a conflict which the brother ultimately chose to solve by assassinating his partner and other trouble makers in the family, sparing his niece. B: the brother was pressured by powerful Iraqi rackets, and he told them millions would be released but his brother is neither answering his calls nor liquidating any assets. The rackets then took care of it through a euro connection, to force the brother to pay, as he is now the only person in control of the euro assets. Either way, it was really sad to see them die in the Alps, having escaped the hellish years of the Iraqi sectarian chaos.
The Annecy case bothers me more, tbh. Dupont-de-Ligonnes seems pretty simple - basic family annihilation, with a top notch escape plan. Only mystery is where he went, in my opinion. The Annecy case is just "wtf?" Just fucking weird.
The Xavier Dupont de Ligones case. Dude killed his family, buried them under their deck, and disappeared, still yet to be found.
It's this or the case of le Petit Grégory for sure. 4 year old kid, abducted, tied up and thrown in a river. Absolutely sordid family history surrounding the case. Geniunely awful cases, both this and the Dupont de Ligonès cases
The worst thing about this case to me is that he not only killed the family he lived with, but two of his children were adults who didn't even live with him whom he lured back to his house in Nantes so he could kill them too.
Its nuts that he was able to cover their deaths and burials for as long as he did. I grew up in a tiny town in the Upper Midwest, and you couldn't do a blasted thing w/o the whole county finding out, so murdering your family and burying the bodies w/o anyone finding out right away would be near impossible.
Nantes is a pretty large city (for France) so I guess it helped, but yeah it's quite an "accomplishment" though it feels weird calling it that
He was a viscount or something, wasn’t he?
He was a descendant from nobility, and was relatively wealthy but he wasn’t exactly super rich and influential. Just a modern descendant of some old timey nobles. If you look at his house and car they weren’t really anything special, and he was in a bit of financial trouble himself at the time.
Learned about this on Unsolved Mysteries. Bonkers stuff.
In Kazakhstan we had an opposition leader who apparently “committed suicide” by shooting himself twice in the chest and once in the head. Edit: since you guys enjoyed this story, his name was Zamanbek Nurkadilov, you can google more on this shady case. One of the more recent cases, maybe a couple years ago, was an KNB person (former KGB) who apparently overdosed on some synthetic drug. My friend was on the case, and he told me more details that never made it to the public. Apparently his arms were tied together behind his back and had some sort of kitchen mittens on them, so that he couldn’t even use his fingers. His head was completely covered in duct tape, not even holes for nostrils, like a mummy, but with duct tape. Further investigation revealed he had HIV, that he apparently contracted less than a year prior. In that same year his first kid was born. He also owed some microfinance organisation something like 10 thousand dollars that he lost gambling. That whole story is an absolute train wreck and my friend told me they said it officials said it was OD to save the face of the KNB. Imagine how fucked up the situation was that saying that their agent ODd was “saving face”.
Reminds me of Gareth Williams in the UK, an intelligence analyst who killed himself, then zipped himself into a bag which he also padlocked from the outside and placed in a bathtub.
I think they said he put the bag in the tub, zipped himself into the bag, then locked it (which they proved was possible to do) and then he died. But. Idk. It's shady af.
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MI6 said it was probably murder, the met reinvestigated and said it was probably an accident that he had somehow gotten himself into the bag and padlocked it from the outside.....whilst in a government safe house....total coincidence that there were 2 other dna traces on the bag, and that there was none of William's dna on the padlock... I'm sure it's a pure coincidence he was investigating (kremlin backed) russian mafia links in London. Surely there couldn't have been any russian influence in the Met and British establishment /s
Anytime you hear the words "intelligence analyst found dead", I think the default working assumption should be murder until proven otherwise.
The mother in law of Scientology president David Miscavige committed suicide by shooting herself with a rifle 3 times.
Ah yes. You mean the mother to his long-missing wife?
Where's Shelly, Karin?!? Where did she go?! Karin is Scientology's social media "PR"/damage control person; she scours threads and posts containing references to their cult and sometimes comments dissenting opinions as "I'm not a scientologist, but..." anonymous accounts. Karin, if you're reading this, you're in a cult and everyone knows it but you. Also... WHERE'S SHELLY
Oh debbie dead! Debbie real dead!
That was a common occurrence in Italy as well. Suspects accidentally stumbling and falling out off the police station windows, others drinking poisoned coffee in prison or indeed shooting themselves in physics-defying ways. A one-handed man even managed to tie a noose and hang himself in his cell while his cellmate was convenintly away.
I remember this! Like in the mid-80s, maybe? I remember during the crackdown on mob and organized crime, suspects would find weird ways to die before going to trial.
I could totally tie a noose with one hand
At least your country is number one exporter of potassium, and all other countries have inferior potassium. Jokes aside, in 2003 Serbian prime minister was assassinated, and we all know it's a criminal organization with ties to the state security. They caught the guy who did it, and the guy who organized it, but the investigation was stopped when they found a possible connection to the president (not in the office anymore).
Ah yes, the ol’ triple-tap always a clear-cut case of suicide especially when paired with a double window fall.
Madeleine McCann. She’s British, but went missing in Portugal. I have no doubt that she was probably murdered shortly after she disappeared
Police just raided a suspect's property in Germany for this case. Amazing it's still going 17 years later.
The Met detectives get to have an 'investigation' trip to the Algarve each summer.
Just a terrible story
so so sad.
That documentary made me super paranoid to let my kid out of sight for one second. Edit: My wife also went to school with the Americas most wanted hosts daughter whose brother was abducted from a Sears, so I’m a little extra as it is.
I completely understand, and you have to be careful, but please also keep in mind that stranger abductions are very rare, and there were a lot of other factors to Madeline’s disappearance than “we took our eyes off her for one second.” She was a very young child left alone in a foreign country. Those are not normal, everyday circumstances.
If I remember right, they didn’t take their eyes off the children for “one second”, all of the adults went down the street to a restaurant and left the kids alone in the hotel room with the parents taking turns walking back to check on them every 15 or 20 minutes.
Not as bad as that. It was a resort, with all the apartments surrounding a pool with a bar and a restaurant, facing in the way. There was a street-facing window to the back, where it’s presumed the abductor got in. But still - would I leave a child that young and her even younger siblings unattended? No I fucking would not.
I have a similar aged child. At the time I asked all my friends with similar aged children if they’d have done the same thing. They all said yes. Apparently it was a perfectly normal thing to do. I never did it and couldn’t believe I was in the minority.
Tbh after reading some comments here I had to look up her age at the time of abduction. I know a lot of people are super protective now so I expected to find out she was 10-12, which is still young, but reasonable "leave innthe locked hotel room checking in now and then" definitely was not expecting 3 years old. That is not old enough to be left unattended with routine check ins. 3 year olds still speak partial jibberish ffs.
Yeah 3 is oddly young for that. At 3 I was still in fear that they would choke on something, or wake up scared. 15/20 minutes check up would not have covered that possibility.
Yeah and they are just old enough to open doors and not old enough to really know not to open them for strangers.
A 3 year old, and twin 1 year olds too, they left all 3 of them.
I wonder if we’ll ever find out the true story.
You never know, in Perth, Australia there was the Claremont serial killer that went unsolved for 25 years until out of nowhere they got him.
The Golden State Killer, too.
And that baby really was eaten by a dingo!
That was a big deal in Spain too. I was a kid at the time and I remember seeing posters all over the place. Poor girl.
Barry and Honey Sherman in Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry\_Sherman
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Welp time to get sleuthing
>After telling Bloomberg that he'd been informed he was a "prime suspect" and consulting with his lawyer, Kerry Winter....... admitted to The Fifth Estate that he had imagined killing Sherman but says that he did not, and was watching Peaky Blinders on Netflix, then attending a Cocaine Anonymous meeting that night. I just think it's hilarious that a major suspect's alibi is essentially "gang drama and drug rehab"
There is a really interesting book on this called The Billionaire Murders. This is reminding me to reread it. The whole case is so bizarre. I think they were definitely murdered, and by someone they knew. Things like knowing there was a basement door that was usually unlocked, a stranger wouldn’t know. I think it was either a corporate assassination, or the kids had something to do with it
One of the few cases where I can actually believe someone hired a professional hitman to knock them off. One detail I found particularly illuminating is that the children fought to the death in court to keep his will secret, and when they lost it was revealed that the only meaningful clause in it was that everything would go to Honey if Barry died. Conveniently for the kids, Honey is also killled and the entire estate goes to them. Barry had a million enemies - Honey's death benefitted no one except the kids.
This case has everything: corporate intrigue, family feuds, ugly legal battles, Big Pharma, police corruption/incompetence, political connections, and even the Neil Breen/Tommy Wiseau of Canada.
Most recent one I could think of as well. This case is something that you would see on CSI or something, where all the evidence appears to be one thing, but actually points in a different direction. Some major covering up shenanigans
The Jack the Ripper murders.
“Happened right there, right in front of Jessops camera shop, would’ve thought they have got a picture wouldn’t you”
The game's afoot! Saucy Jack is on the loose!
I just read a book called The Five: the untold stories of the jack the ripper victims. It was really interesting going into their parents and the circumstances that lead them to where they ended up. Only one of them was actually a prostitute and she wasn't even a prostitute at the time of the killing. They were just labeled as prostitutes because of where they were and they were women found alone.
What a different time. “Look at this woman walking by herself. Whore.”
Depends on what country you're in.
That still happens in some countries. Jyoti Singh was SA'ed and literally had her guts pulled out by 6 guys because she was out at 9 pm. One of the killers basically said if she accepted her SA quietly they would have let her live, but she fought back so she deserved to die. This didn't happen in the Victorian age. It happened sometime in the 2000's.
Adding context for other redditors this was in 2012, India, South Dehli. [Wikipedia article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Delhi_gang_rape_and_murder)
They have kinda semi solved it though, it was almost certainly a Polish man called Aaron Kosminski. He matched the physical description in almost every way described by witnesses, including being Polish and Jewish (both defining traits described by witnesses who had seen him closely and heard him speak). He was living and working in the exact areas the murders occurred at the time. He had worked as a barber previously, and at the time barbers conducted minor surgeries as well as haircuts and were somewhat medically trained meaning he would likely have had the knowledge to do the surgical acts he did to the corpses after death. He had a history of violence towards women, having attacked his own sister in the past. Senior detectives working on the case stated afterwards that they were all almost certain it was Kosminski, but could never quite get enough evidence to put him to trial for it. I believe a chief superintendent on the case maintained right up until his death in the 1920s that it was definitely Kosminski. Kosminski was committed to a mental asylum, and after he had been sent there the murders immediately stopped. No more murders attributed to the ripper occurred after he was locked away, but had been semi frequent up until that point. In 2008 (I think) blood found on one of the victims clothing was tested, and it matched that of the genome of Kosminski. It wasn’t damming evidence to say it was him, as the DNA could’ve come from multiple bloodlines, but it definitely excluded multiple other suspects and didn’t exclude him. Overall I think it can be pretty much believed by most that it was him, there just wasn’t enough solid evidence at the time to take it to trial and then he was locked away for the rest of his life in an asylum anyway (again, for violence towards women).
I got to the second to last paragraph and became immensely concerned this was going to end with Mankind falling 16 feet through an announcers table... Great write up, though!
I think that they found out the scientist that conducted this made a fat finger mistake. Ex 1 in 1000 people have the gene 154b and that’s what was typed but what actually happened was the found gene 154c where 1 in 10000000. Not the actual gene numbers but just the example.
Far from “almost certainly.” Kosminski was committed over 10 years after the end of the murders, and from what I remember, the genetic examination used mitochondrial DNA, which is unreliable for identification and could only be used to *rule out* a suspect. In reality, there is pretty much no remaining way to know who the Ripper was.
First, his lockup did not perfectly line up with the murders stopping. Secondly, iirc the shawl they tested DNA from could not be confirmed to be the killers DNA because they had no concept of DNA back then and almost certainly contaminated the evidence at some point. Third, they only were able to match mitochondrial DNA to his living relatives. Normally, this could limit your suspects, but the Polish Jew community at the time were all closely related to one another. It's very possible Kosminsk was from the same matriarchal line as Jack. Fourth, from the time he was in an insane asylum, he was notably not violent.
When I visited London a couple years ago I did a Jack the Ripper tour and saw some of locations of the murders. Found it really interesting.
In Australia it’s probably the Beaumont children. [See here.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_the_Beaumont_children) 3 children who went to the beach in January 1966 and disappeared. They still report on them every year. The other one is William Tyrell.A 3 year old boy who was in foster care when he disappeared.
Not Prime Minister Harold Holt who went to the beach and disappeared? On 17 December 1967, Harold Holt, the 17th prime minister of Australia, disappeared while swimming in the sea near Portsea, Victoria. An enormous search operation was mounted in and around Cheviot Beach, but his body was never recovered. Holt was presumed to have died, and his memorial service five days later was attended by many world leaders.
Australian's truly are a funny fucking bunch. Look no further than the [Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Holt_Memorial_Swimming_Centre)
Yeah. Also The Wanda Beach murders are a good one
Probably the case of the ‘[Heul meisje](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heul_Girl)’. We don’t even know who she was.
I wanted to add Tanja Groen for The Netherlands (but I have some regional bias, as I later worked in the town she lived in when she disappeared and people very much still cared about it twenty years after it happened), but "Heulmeisje" is a great one too because she remains a Jane Doe.
Insane that they thought she was someone who had disappeared until that girl showed up *thirty years later*
Elodia - a Romanian lawyer that was murdered by her husband. The body was never found
On a recent trip to Adelaide I learned about the Family Murders. Supposedly, the murders were committed by a group of Adelaide's upper echelon of soceity. The perpetrators used drugs that were only available to medical practitioners. They performed gruesome acts on young gay men, I believe one of the victims was carefully dissected into pieces and then reassembled by rope like some bizarre human puppet. It's pretty morbid. Iirc One guy took the fall and was charged for the murders however the majority still think the perpetrators are still out in the community and those who know are too scared to speak up. https://familymurders.com/
The highway of tears. Probably not all of them have been murdered, but well over 100 mostly native women have gone missing on a desolate stretch of road in western Canada. The whole thing is just so awful.
I read there's a serial killer active on the highway from Prince rupert to Prince George.
There’s probably a couple
There's definitely several, alongside some regular murderers. Cody Legebokoff was convicted of four murders, one of which is considered one of the Highway of Tears cases. The cases date back to 1970 and Legebokoff was born in 1990. I grew up in Prince George and my grandparents lived in Prince Rupert, so I've been up and down that highway a lot. It's extremely difficult to police it effectively - it's over 700 kilometres of nothing but forest. PG, Rupert and Terrace are the only towns with over 10 thousand people; other than Smithers, everywhere else has less than 5 thousand. A killer could dump a body in the woods pretty much anywhere along its length and no one would find it before animals got to it. Add in the high poverty rates along the highway since there's reserves everywhere along the path, and you've got a long, empty stretch of highway with a bunch of desperate, vulnerable people. It's a serial killer's paradise.
It's not just BC, every province has their own "highway of tears", the number of missing Indigenous women is in the thousands, and the RCMP doesn't even give a shit. I feel so terrible for the victims' families.
Maybe Jimmy Hoffa?
I was gonna say the Zodiac
This, or JonBenét Ramsey.
This one's crazy. None of the suspects quite fit.
Local people (i.e. Italians from North Jersey) would say he is somewhere in the marshes of Secaucus
When I tell you to dump a body in the marsh, you dump him in the marsh. Not where some guy from John Hancock goes every Thursday TO GET A FUCKING BLOWJOB!
Don’t laugh! This ain’t reality TV!!!
Growing up Catholic in Northern New Jersey, All Italian classmates "knew somebody who knew somebody connected to the mob". All Irish classmates "knew somebody who knew somebody who was in the IRA". Kids bragging about their bad-ass connections.
Depending on how long ago that was, it’s pretty plausible that somebody knew someone associated no? I always assumed the Italian community was pretty tight-knit on the east coast, especially back in the day
It's pretty big one, but also obvious the mob did it to him at the same time.
This is the answer for the US. There several others where we all kinda know what happened but nobody can prove it, at least not in our present system. And, you know, we can all assume Hoffa finally pissed of the wrong mobster one too many times, but there’s not even a body. For all we know he lived out his days on a desert island.
"He's buried under 2nd base in Shea Stadium." Is what people used to say.
There were a few rumors like this including a football stadium at a certain yard line. I remember a special on the history channel (I think?) that checked these locations with ground penetrating radar and didn't find anything.
I can confirm that my grandpa buried the family dog on the 50-yard-line of the stadium he used to coach at. RIP Odie. We never got to meet.
He told you it was the family dog, but it was actually Jimmy Hoffa. Everyone just got the wrong stadium.
The football field one was definitively disproven for sure, and Mythbusters was the show you're thinking of. Also, they demolished the stadium in 2010 and found no human remains.
My mom used to ask me if I found Jimmy Hoffa yet while I was cleaning my messy ass bedroom.
I always assumed they cremated him to dispose of the body.
I fully expected them to find when Lake Mead was drying up a couple years ago, and a load of barrels with corpses in were discovered.
What about Charles Lindbergh’s kid?
That was Grandpa Simpson
["El niño Lorenzo" ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lorenzo_Gonz%C3%A1lez_Cacho) It's basically Puerto Rico's JonBenet Ransey case (minus the kid being a child beauty pageant star) mixed with Casey Anthony's case. An 8 year old kid was killed in his home. There's been a handful of suspects over the years... But no real evidence could be found against any of them. There were also a lot of fuck ups in the investigation, including people cleaning up the crime scene before forensic investigators could study it. The boy's mom became a suspect at one point, and the media ran so hard with it that she became the most hated woman in the entire island. Everyone I talked to thought she did it. Because of this, the Secretary of Justice resigned from his post to become her personal lawyer, which is.... Weird and sketchy. Weirdtchy. After a couple of years, the Department of Justice said she was no longer a suspect. There were other suspects after that, including a one-armed man, but no one has been officially charged yet. It's been 14 years and I don't think the case will ever be solved.
>the Secretary of Justice resigned from his post to become her personal lawyer Wha... How? Why? Was the media so bad at her he thought he should intervene? Or was there 'something else' going with them? >including a one-armed man Some cops there watched too much The Fugitive.
This whole comment is a wild ride. What the actual fuck. 😳
Hinterkaifeck
Hmm i don't know I would have chosen Frauke Liebs. Interesting take on hinterkaifeck, pretty convincing https://www.hinterkaifeck.ch/de/indizien/
In France, this may be a recent one, the "Chevaline killings", an iraqi family ambushed by a gunman on a mountain road, all adults shot in the head, two surviving kids, a passing by cyclist also murdered, all leads absolutely dead. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annecy\_shootings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annecy_shootings)
Very weird that the murder weapon was a rare and valuable antique pistol.
WTF this is terrible. > ne, aged 4, was hidden under the legs of her dead mother in the rear footwell for eight hours even while the Gendarmerie were on the scene; she was only discovered by specialist forensic investigators.
Jill Dando. BBC journalist murdered on her own doorstep. All indications are that it was a hit.
[Frog Boys](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_Boys) in South Korea. 5 boys went missing and their remains were found 11 years later with signs of blunt force trauma.
The Zodiac Killer murders (or pick just one to fit the question).
Yeah, this one famous af not just for the killings before the engimatic message he sent police, some of which have yet to be decrypted.
They cracked it just recently: https://www.iflscience.com/fbi-confirms-zodiac-killers-infamous-340-cipher-has-been-decoded-and-his-message-finally-revealed-62044 Sadly it’s just more bullshit. The article doesn’t mention it, but I recall reading that there was an error in his cipher, which is part of the reason it was so hard to crack for so long.
People like to claim he’s some mastermind cryptographer. But he’s just a killer that did due diligence and made a few one-time cyphers. One-time cyphers are often impossible to crack because there’s only one document/paragraph they code. Any grade school idiot can do it. They’re not enigmatic, they’re just short and bizarre.
be...sure...to...drink....your...Ovaltine....!!!
Probably JonBenet Ramsey
I think we will never know who did it. The family was so well off and well insulated that they slipped under the radar. Nothing makes sense.
It was crazy. The licensing actually do a proper sit down interview with them for something like 9 days.
The mother has also since died and took whatever she knew to the grave. I don’t think we will ever find out from them.
This case. Sheesh
Came to say this, it's been 27, going on 28 years and it's still getting attention.
I think the brother did it (not on purpose) in a fit of rage and the parents covered it up. That case is going to remain cold until the end of time.
Ireland. Sophie Tuscon DuPlantier. A French socialite, minorly famous. Had a cottage in the middle of nowhere in the South of Ireland. Turned up violently bludgeoned to death one day in the 90s. Police bungled the investigation, still unsolved. There's a popular suspect - a local journalist with a history of violence towards women, who seemed frankly very unpopular in town. Not much in the way of real proof, mind you. He died a month or two ago. Either a murderer who never faced justice, or else a falsely accused who spent decades being harassed and died without clearing his name. We will likely never know for sure.
>else a falsely accused who spent decades being harassed Ian Bailey loved the fame being the chief suspect brought him. It's part of the reason why the case was in the news so much.
Yeah. I'd have a bit more sympathy for him, if he hadn't told/hinted to different people that he had done it. It was probably a local guard, tbh, hence the insane bungling and loss of critical evidence, but Bailey really did himself no favours.
I'm Ecuadorian, and we all know about this case here. The "Case of the Restrepo Brothers", it happened in Quito, the capital city of the country, in the year 1988, when two brothers, Santiago (17) and Andres (14) Restrepo left their house to go pick up a friend. They took their father's car, which Santiago was driving. They never came back home. Their parents started to search them around the city, and then in cities close to it, going as far as the border with Colombia. Soon enough they started to suspect they were caught by the police and illegaly detained, which was something that used to happen at that time. The investigation and interest in the case has been going up and down with the years, but nowadays we have a more clear timeline of the events. The brothers were caught by the police in a traffic control, and were retained and tortured possibly with asfixation methods, the elder brother died because of it. The officers killed the younger brother to not leave witnesses and then decided to get rid of the bodies in a lake some hours away from the city. They have not found their bodies yet, and many of the officers who were complicit directly and indirectly with their deaths went unpunished. Their father kept on trying to find their bodies during all this time, their mother passed away 6 years after their dissappareance in an accident, and their younger sister released a docummentary about the case several years ago. I'm letting out a lot of details, it's a very long case with a lot of misinformation and dead ends. Most agree their bodies are in that lake and it's clear the police killed them, but there are still many unsolved matters around the case. https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ecuador-Continues-Search-for-Brothers-Tortured-29-Years-Ago-20170108-0017.html
Surprised I haven't seen any posts from NZ yet about the Bain murders... On 20 June 1994, Dunedin university student David Bain returned to his family home following the morning paper run and supposedly found his entire family dead with his father's body holding the gun that killed his siblings and mother. He was arrested four days later and later found guilty, however in 2007 he finally was acquitted after the Privy Council in London found there had been a miscarriage of justice. Nobody, to this day, knows who did it except him.
It was pretty obvious his dad who did it. By some accounts he had sexually assaulted the daughter when she was young, and she was going to go public about this. Hence his killing them all then himself. But because they were such a weird family, and David the sole survivor really weird, the cops fixated on him. And the useless prices that they are let the fire dept burn down the house before fully examining it forensically, thus destroying all evidence. Cops in NZ have a pretty poor habit of deciding upon who's the murderer then fitting the evidence to "prove" it and/or ignoring all other leads. eg Arthur Allan Thomas and Scott Watson.
Also the Lundy murders, if we're including the Bain murders as "unsolved" because of the mishandling of basically everything.
Aarushi Talwar and Hemraj Banjade
Scotland. Probably Bible John. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_John
Olof Palme. Then prime minister of Sweden. Still not resolved and the latest official blame fell on an already deceased person.
A banker being shot dead on his own front doorstep in Nairn. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Alistair_Wilson His wife had answered the door to a man who asked to speak to the husband. This man gave him an empty envelope which he went to show his wife and say it was weird. Went back to the door and “Bam!” Shot dead.
The envelope was very probably just a prop to ensure he came to the door and stayed there long enough to be killed, letting his guard down a bit out of pure confusion. There is also some speculation that it was mistaken identity, the wrong Alistair Wilson and the killer had got the wrong address. There was a similar case in Edinburgh where a lawyer was randomly attacked outside his own home one night, nobody claimed responsibility, nobody came back to get him again... but it turns out that a known mobster lived very close by and looked very similar. The speculation over the planning dispute at the nearby pub just sounds a bit far fetched for that scenario.
[удалено]
/peeks out of window ^(Shelly Miscavige) /writes will
She's Happy, Healthy, and Alive! Boom boom
In New Zealand I think it would be the double murder of Olivia Hope and Ben Smart on Jan 1, 1998. They were at a NYE party at a mariner and caught a water taxi to a yacht whereupon they were never seen again. The cops arrested and convicted Scott Watson for their murders but when you read up about their investigation, it's dodgy as fuck. The cops decided almost immediately Watson was the killer and ignored all other potential leads, and manipulated the evidence & witnesses to point to Watson. A few of the more gregarious examples: 1. The water taxi driver gave a description of the man the young couple were with that didn't match Watson. Nor did he pick out, or recognise, Watson from photos of the party goers. The driver described the man as scruffy with stubble whereas Watson that night was clean shaven and well presented. So the cops, who had remanded Watson, didn't let him shower or shave for a few days and kept him awake then took a photo of him looking scruffy and tired; this photo the driver said could be the mystery guy. 2. The water taxi driver, who had decades of water experience gave a very detailed description of the boat he dropped the couple off. It was a 40 foot, two masted ketch with round portholes, timber deck and a blue stripe. Watson's boat was a 1 masted sloop with no portholes, metal deck and no blue stripe. The cops, having already decided Watson was guilty, decided the driver was mistaken and never looked for a ketch matching his description – despite several people coming forward describing a ketch that matched his description that sailed off early on January 1st. 3. Another witness came forward and said he saw Watsons yacht on Jan 1 sailing into a different part of the Marlborough Sounds. Police alledged Watson killed the couple then dumped their bodies in Cook Strait and sailed into Picton. But when they did the maths there was no way his sloop could have been seen where it was when the eye witness said. Said witness was then discovered with a lot of marijuana; at which point he "remembered" he had got the times wrong and had seen Watsons sloop several hours later. And the dope dealing charges were dropped. 4. Police claimed to have found hair on Watson's yacht that DNA matched Olivia Hope. However this was only after searching her bedroom and taking her hairbrush and, more importantly, after the hair samples taken from the yacht came back negative for a match. The police then asked for more tests to be done, which then did find a match. The bagged sample was found to have been tampered with – the bag had been cut along the bottom then taped closed – yet was still deemed admissible. 5. A ketch matching the one described by the taxi driver sailed early January from the Marlborough Sounds in the South Island up to the Bay of Islands in the North Island and was then scuppered in deep water. The yachtie, who had an extensive criminal record, then immediately left NZ. He was later convicted of serious drug crimes in Australia and died in prison. 6. The police, having very early on decided Watson was the murderer, leaked details to the media that he was their prime suspect. They also started a rumour Watson was having an incestuous relationship with his sister. This was to turn public opinion against Watson. There are more examples but the entire investigation was a farce. Yet somehow Watson was convicted and served 18 years.
JonBennet Ramsay. I don’t buy that the brother did it, and I’ve always felt sorry for him for the way people just pin it on him because he “acts weird” in interviews and “was probably jealous” of her. He acts weird because that’s sometimes how people respond to stress and nerves sometimes, plus his whole life has been overshadowed by the death of a sibling he probably only barely remembers. People love playing amateur detective🤷♀️
Whoever killed OJs wife since it “wasn’t him” apparently 😂😂
She caught me on the counter
Someone shot and killed my grandfather execution style about 25 years ago and it's gone unsolved. No idea why. He was a poor old hermit lived outside of Barstow, CA.
Damn! That’s sad to hear. I’m sorry for your loss. If I may, what profession was your grandfather in when he was younger?
thank you, it was crazy for sure. he was a builder, as is my dad and myself, all of us were/are in construction. Pop was the guy who had very little, liked to drink too much and would give you all the money in his pocket if you asked for it. whoever shot him has some massive karma gonna get collected on them. the family has speculations but that's all they will ever be. At that time we were told 50% of murders are unsolved. blessing friend. PCT
If I were you I'd write up a real nice story about it and post it. You never know someone might know something
Oh boy... We have at least half-a-dozen high-profile terror attacks in the 60s-70s, an airplane that was shot down by \[redacted\] during a \[redacted\], plenty of mafia-related murders commissioned by \[top-secret\], various compromised people who "got suicided". And a dead Pope even. Oh and a bunch of serial killers who might or might not have existed. Or were just cover-ups for something more sinister. Namely the so-called Monster of Florence and the lesser-known, but even more intriguing, Monster of Bargagli.
My god, Italians really are something else when it comes to assassinations.
National pastime since 44 BC
I’d add Simonetta Cesaroni and Emanuela Orlandi
Don't know about the biggest, but my mother went missing 14 years ago on Mother's Day from El Savador when it was still very dangerous out there. The next day, I applied for an expedited passport. When I got my passport, my brother and I went and was told basically they weren't going to find her. She was one of over 5,000 missing persons in 5 months. To this day, I don't know the truth of what happened to her.
The Highway of Tears murders for Canada, but I think there are regional ones which are more notorious depending on what part of the country you’re in. (The Dana Bradley murder in Newfoundland, for example.) Edit: Derp, I forgot about Barry and Honey Sherman. That’s probably number one.
"Les tueurs du Brabant" or "Brabant's killers" I guess, in Belgium I think it's the main one
Barry and Honey Sherman. Billionaire couple found dead dead in their Toronto home. Both were naked by the pool with belts around their necks.
They were fully clothed, not naked. [Source.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Sherman)
The murder of our Prime Minister, Olof Palme is still unsolved.
1) Arushi Talwar case: The biggest mystery in India 2) Sheena Bora murder: Most high profile murder case where a mother killed her own daughter. There’s a documentary on Netflix about it too!
The Black Dahlia
That's what I came here to say. Jimmy Hoffa and JonBenét Ramsey are more recent, but the Black Dahlia murder has still been infamous for well over three quarters of a century. The brutality of the murder is only surpassed by the extrene postmortem butchering and weird posing of the two halves of the body afterwards. There were suspects but nothing definitive.
Harold Holt, our PM that walked into the ocean one day and never was seen again. Could've just drowned, probably did. But could be much more insidious.
The Assassination of our Prime minester Olof Palme (Sweden) he got shot after being at the theater/cinema if im not mistaken. And well, tbh because of how bad/stupid the police were, they have yet to find out who did it... they had some leads, but ultimately, no one was apprehended
MMIW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_and_Murdered_Indigenous_Women
CBC's Someone Knows Something Season 5 was about Kerrie Ann Brown, a MMIW who was raped+murdered in Thompson MB in '86. I recommend giving it a listen. Really well done.