Tag: mysterious disappearances

It’s one of Australia’s most baffling cases – a mother, her daughter and friend who disappeared while under the spell of a cult leader. Now, a retired cop has lifted the lid on what he thinks REALLY happened

A retired policeman is on a mission to solve one of Australia’s most baffling missing persons cases, which began 17 years ago with the disappearance of an entire household who were members of a doomsday cult. 

Barry McIntosh, whose interest in the case is personal, served 35 years with Victoria Police and hopes to search a remote patch of Western Australian bushland with cadaver dogs.

Mr McIntosh is the uncle of Chantelle McDougall, who was last seen alive in July 2007 with her British-born partner Gary Felton, their six-year-old daughter Leela and friend Tony Popic.   

Ms McDougall, 27, had fallen under the spell of 45-year-old Felton, a self-styled spiritualist who had assumed the identity of an English workmate called Simon Kadwell.

At the time of their disappearance, Ms McDougall and Leela had been living with Felton in a rundown farmhouse at Nannup, about 280km south of Perth, with 42-year-old Mr Popic.

Mr McIntosh is convinced Felton was involved in the deaths of his niece, her daughter and Mr Popic and is determined to find their bodies.

‘[Felton] spoke of providing Chantelle and Leela with a drug that would provide a peaceful death and that Tony would bury them all,’ he says.

‘Tony would then walk into the bush to take his own life.’ 

The charismatic Felton – ‘Si’ to his acolytes – was the founder of Truth Fellowship and had 40 online followers of what has been described as an international doomsday cult.

Felton called his followers The Forecourt and spoke to them through a chatroom known as The Gateway where they would discuss teachings from his book, Servers of the Divine Plan.

That book warned about Earth’s pending doom but promised a new world of higher consciousness once a 75,000-year ‘cycle’ had run its course.

Neighbours at Nannup said ‘off the planet’ Felton was obsessed with electromagnetic fields and deeply paranoid.

Felton, who did not work and relied on the subservient Ms McDougall and Mr Popic for financial support, slept during the day and stayed up all night on his computer.  

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ARCHAEOLOGISTS UNEARTH NEW CLUES THAT COULD HELP SOLVE CENTURIES-OLD “LOST COLONY” MYSTERY

In 1587, John White and a group of approximately 115 English settlers landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. The colony they sought to establish marked the second attempt to create a long-term presence in the New World under the direction of Sir Walter Raleigh, who instructed them to establish a city bearing his name in the vicinity of the Chesapeake Bay. However, much like the earlier failed effort under Governor Ralph Lane in 1585, White and his fellow colonists soon began to face challenges that included strained relations with the region’s Indigenous inhabitants.

With hopes of garnering additional support for the colony, White sailed back to England, leaving his daughter Eleanor Dare, her husband Ananias Dare, and their infant daughter Virginia—the first English child born in America—behind on Roanoke Island. By the time he returned in 1590, following delays imposed by the Anglo-Spanish War, White found the settlement had been deserted. The only potential clues regarding the whereabouts of the colonists had been an inscription of the word “CROATOAN” carved into a palisade, along with the letters “CRO” found carved into a nearby tree, seemingly in reference to a nearby island located 50 miles to the south.

For centuries, historians have attempted to resolve the mystery of Roanoke’s famous “Lost Colony.” Theories about the fate of the colonists range from their assimilation with local Indigenous tribes to their possible death resulting from attacks by them. Others have proposed that the colonists may have died in a failed attempt to return to England or even that their fate may have been linked to the arrival of the Spanish prior to White’s return in 1590.

For White, the inscriptions left at the deserted colony were clear evidence of the colonists’ relocation to Croatoan Island. An agreement had been made that in the event of their departure, they would leave behind a “secret token” indicating their whereabouts, or if they were imperiled, they would instead leave a cross pattée indicating such circumstances.

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Grieving daughters claim psychic medium led them to their missing mom’s body after police bungled the search… as eerie ‘paranormal’ details are revealed

Two grieving Louisiana sisters claim a psychic medium in Wisconsin revealed the location of their mother’s body after she vanished over a year ago. 

Ashley Deese, the daughter of Theresa Jones, 56, said police had been stumped over her mother’s disappearance, and criticized their investigation that was seemingly solved once medium Carolyn Clapper stepped in. 

Theresa went missing on February 2, 2023, and Ashley told KNOE that she spent hours searching for her mother alongside the Union Parish Sheriff’s Office’s K9 unit. 

Days later, Ashley and her sister Brittany reached out to Clapper in Wisconsin, who is well known among the psychic community over her claims of finding missing people. 

Ashley claimed she was able to provide eerily accurate details leading to the body, but remains unsatisfied as cops never spoke to the medium and ruled the death as an accidental drowning caused by methamphetamines. 

‘It’s been a year now since this has happened, and she has so much information pertaining to this case,’ she said. 

After contacting Clapper, Ashley said Clapper returned the request with a midnight phone call, and offered to offer her help pro-bono. 

Over a 45-minute conversation, Ashley claimed that the psychic gave her precise step-by-step instructions as to how to locate her mother’s body, which lay in a creek close to her home. 

It is unexplained how the police’s K9 unit and extensive searches did not find the body, which appeared to be only a short distance behind Theresa’s property around 200 yards into a wooded area. 

Describing what her ‘psychic visions’ apparently told her, Clapper said: ‘There would be a log, she kept showing me this pronounced log, a very big log in the woods.’

‘It wasn’t just little twigs and sticks, it was a log, a huge one,’ she continued.

‘You know you hit this log is basically what she said, you get to this log and my body will be there. There’s water, I saw a creek.’ 

Following the phone call, Ashley said she went out looking for her mother, and claimed the medium’s eerie accuracy even detailed the position of her mother’s body and its deteriorating condition. 

‘I immediately got ill, shaky, and sick, and started vomiting,’ Ashley added. 

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‘Ex-CIA psychic claims he had already told police where Émile Soleil’s body would be found before the tragic child’s remains were discovered’

A former CIA psychic has claimed he had already told police where the body of missing French toddler Émile Soleil would be found before the horror discovery on Saturday.

Major Ed Dames, 74, said he had used a technique called ‘remote viewing’ to locate the two-year-old in the idyllic Alpine hamlet of Le Vernet after his sudden disappearance from his grandparents’ home last July.

The method, used by US and Soviet agents during the Cold War, ostensibly sees psychics access ‘remote geographic targets otherwise inaccessible’, ‘looking into the distance and the future’ merely by thinking.

Maj Dames showed The Sun emails he had sent to police last December claiming Émile was ‘located at, or in proximity to’ a field next to the site where ramblers found the bones and skull on March 31.

‘It took me two days,’ he told the newspaper. ‘I jumped on it immediately. I knew this is a serious case and the sense of urgency is high.’

Maj Dames worked as an operations and training officer at the joint CIA and Army Psychic Intelligence Unit, a now-defunct project that inspired the book and 2009 black comedy ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’.

The bones and skull of young Émile were found by walkers on Saturday ‘on a path between the Church and Chapel’ of the quiet Alpine village of Le Vernet, according to mayor François Balique.

The site, barely a kilometre from where Émile disappeared while staying with his grandfather in July, had already been scoured by gendarmes with a ‘tooth comb’, the mayor told Le Figaro.

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MH370’s suicidal pilot entombed plane and its 239 passengers at bottom of the ocean after perfect ditching, says flight expert 10 years after plane disappeared

The ‘suicidal’ pilot of the MH370 Malaysia Airlines flight perfectly ditched the plane into the sea, entombing it and the 239 passengers aboard at the bottom of the ocean, a flight expert has claimed ten years after it disappeared.

British pilot Simon Hardy has said he believes that the plane was sunk into the ocean at a spot that has never been searched before.

The Boeing 777 aircraft vanished from radar while en route from Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Satellite data showed the plane deviated from its flight path to head over the southern Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed.

There are fears that pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, was responsible for deliberately crashing MH370 in a murder-suicide of a shocking scale, which he committed because of problems in his personal life.

Shah had allegedly split with his wife Fizah Khan, and was said to be furious that a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, had been given a five-year jail sentence for sodomy shortly before he boarded the plane for the flight to Beijing. But the pilot’s wife has angrily denied any personal problems, while other family members and friends said he was a devoted family man and loved his job.

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MH370 – the mystery that stunned the world: Ten years on, we look at the theories about what happened, the fight for a new search and the clues that hint equally at tragic accident.. or murder

Friday marks ten years since Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished without a trace, tragically becoming one of the world’s great aviation mysteries.

The plane carrying 239 people bound for Beijing disappeared from radar screens on March 8, 2014, shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur.

Despite the largest search in aviation history, which combed 46,332 square miles of the sea floor of the southern Indian Ocean, only a few fragments of the Boeing 777-200ER plane have been found, scattered on beaches thousands of miles apart.

The operation was suspended in January 2017.

The families of those who were lost to the abyss have long hoped that by finding the missing plane, authorities would finally be able to give them an answer to the question that has haunted them for a decade: What happened to their loved ones?

In the years since, the void left by the missing wreckage has been filled by speculation and outlandish conspiracy theories, when the fact is that still – after ten years – no one alive today truly knows beyond reasonable doubt what happened.

Hopes were once again raised this week that the question could be answered with the announcement that Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim would be ‘happy to reopen’ the search if ‘compelling’ evidence emerged.

This came after Texas robotics firm Ocean Infinity said it had proposed a new search for the missing jetliner to the Malaysian government while claiming to have new evidence – six years after carrying out an unsuccessful search in 2018.

While it remains to be seen whether a new search will unearth any new clues, the families of the victims remain in limbo. Today, as they mark 10 years since their loved ones were lost, MailOnline looks back at the MH370 tragedy.

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Mystery ship that vanished with 32 crew members finally found after 120 years

A 120-year-old mystery of a missing ship that vanished without a trace off the coast of Australia has finally been solved — thanks to undersea explorers who stumbled on it by luck.

The SS Nemesis was transporting coal to Melbourne, Australia, in July 1904 when it got caught in a powerful storm off New South Wales and vanished along with its 32 crew members.

In the weeks after the storm, bodies of crew members and fragments of the ship’s wreckage washed ashore at Cronulla Beach about 18 miles south of Sydney.

The SS Nemesis was found accidentally, after it vanished off the coast of Australia in 1904.

The loss generated a media storm and intense public interest, but wreckage of the 240-foot vessel was never found and its final resting place remained a mystery.

Subsea Professional Marine Services, a remote sensing company searching the ocean floor off the coast of Sydney for lost cargo in 2022, accidentally stumbled upon the missing shipwreck.

The wreck was found completely untouched, about 16 miles offshore under nearly 525 feet of water.

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Madeline McCann disappearance: Bombshell claim about chief suspect Christopher Brueckner

The prime suspect in the disappearance of Maddie McCann allegedly confessed to a friend and petty criminal the British toddler ‘didn’t scream’ after she was ripped from her parent’s holiday home, never to be seen again.

Madeleine McCann was just three years old when she vanished from her bed at her parent’s holiday home in the coastal town of Praia da Luz, Portugal on May 3, 2007, sparking one of the world’s most enduring cold cases.

While no one has ever been charged with the toddler’s disappearance, German authorities in June 2020 revealed convicted rapist Christian Brueckner was their prime suspect. This week, he faces trial in Germany on unrelated charges.

Mr Brueckner, who is known under German privacy laws as Christian B, stands accused of raping a 14-year-old and two other women, as well as sexually assaulting other children, and is currently in jail convicted of rape.

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States with the largest numbers of missing persons revealed – and why Ohio is NOT among them

Oklahoma has the highest rate of missing persons in the US, with Arizona and the rest of the South not far behind.

About 2,300 Americans are reported missing every day, and though the vast majority of them are found within a few days, others are still vanished.

California, Texas, and Florida have the most active cases, according to federal statistics, but aren’t even in the top 10 when accounting for population.

Oklahoma has 16 missing persons per 100,000 residents, Arizona in second with 14.2 and Oregon with 12.5, according to the National US Missing Persons Database.

They are followed by Southern states like Louisiana with 12, Arkansas with 11.6, and New Mexico with 11.5. Texas has 8.5, California 8.6, and New York just 5.5.

Lowest in the nation are Massachusetts with 2.7, followed by states around the Great Lakes like Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana at 3.3 each.

Ohio has only 3.5 missing persons for 100,000 residents, despite misleading reports last year that 1,072 children were reported missing in Cleveland alone.

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Breakthrough in search for Amelia Earhart’s plane after ‘wreckage found on seabed’

The mystery around what happened to Amelia Earhart – the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean – may be finally solved.

Divers believe they have finally discovered her plane lying on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean near where the American aviator vanished in 1937.

Since her disappearance – during her most ambitious journey – millions of dollars have been spent on finding the wreckage.

Experts have long wondered where the missing adventurer lies – and this may be a huge breakthrough in he case.

After scanning 5,200 miles of seabed near Earhart’s last known position, surveyors Deep Sea Vision believe they may have located her Lockheed 10-E Electra.

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