Tag: unsolved mysteries

US Risks Becoming First World Power Where Most Murders Go Unsolved

The United States is on its way to becoming the first developed country where most murders go unsolved, according to a Murder Accountability Project report.

Despite solving more murders in any year since 1997, solved homicide cases dropped to below 50% in 2020, the lowest recorded level, according to a Thomas Hargrove, founder of the Murder Accountability Project, report drawn from FBI data. In 1980, 71% of homicide cases were solved.

“Do we have to go to the status of most murders going unsolved? No, we don’t but the trend line certainly suggests we might,” Hargrove told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The truth is that we’re already there in dozens and dozens of major cities. It’s plain and simple that in many major American urban areas, most murders go unsolved and have done so for several years now.”

In 2019, 77% of homicides were solved in the Netherlands while 98% were solved in Finland, according to European Journal of Criminology report. Canada had a 75% success rate in solving murders, and Germany’s success rate ranged from 88% to 94%.

The cities with the most homicides in 2020 included Detroit, Michigan, St. Louis, Missouri, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, according to the report. Most of the homicide cases in 202o and 2021 involved guns.

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Newlywed Republican councilwoman, 30, was shot ‘SEVEN TIMES in the face as she drove her SUV outside her New Jersey home’ – as FBI investigates ‘personal attack’

FBI agents are now investigating after a Republican councilwoman was ‘shot in the face seven times’ while driving her SUV home – as Governor Phil Murphy said it was ‘not politically motivated’.

Eunice Dwumfour, 30, was shot outside of her home in Sayreville, New Jersey on Wednesday night, with friends calling it a ‘targeted and personal attack’.

According to friends, the mother-of-one was shot seven times in the face and seven times in the body.

She crashed her SUV with her slumped over the wheel, with horrified neighbors hearing multiple gunshots and then a crash.

Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office and Sayreville Police are leading the investigation, with the FBI now becoming ‘involved’ in the investigation.

Dwumfour was found inside of her white Nissan SUV with multiple gunshot wounds on Samuel Circle just before 7.30pm.

She recently married a pastor who lives in Nigeria, just before Thanksgiving, and lived in the apartment with her 12-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.

Friend and Pastor Nelia Rodriguez told The Ingraham Angle that she believes the incident was a ‘personal attack’.

She added: ‘We believe it [was] very personal because she was shot seven times in the face and another seven shots were hitting everywhere else.

‘So for somebody to get so close to somebody and shoot them so many times, it has to be personal.’

The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office said the investigation into Dwumfour’s death is ongoing and officials have not released a motive or any information about a suspect.

There have been no arrested in the case, with officials seen searching a wooded area near her home after witnesses claimed they saw a man run off in that direction after the shooting.

Police received a tip that the murder weapon had been dumped in the area, so brought in police dogs to search the area.

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Rare Discovery Of Roman Dodecahedron Fragment Adds To Archaeological Mystery

A chance find by an amateur metal detectorist has added to a long-running mystery of archaeology, as a fragment of an Ancient Roman dodecahedron has been found in the small town of Kortessem, in Belgium. 

The piece, originally part of a dodecahedron measuring 5-6 centimeters (2–2.36 inches) in size, shows signs of having been repaired in the past, with local archaeologists at the Flanders Heritage Agency suggesting that it may have been broken in some kind of ancient ritual.

Roman dodecahedra are something of a puzzle: more than 100 such artifacts have been found throughout Europe over the past few centuries, each of them meticulously cast in these perfect 12-sided polyhedra. Each face of the bronze dodecahedra has a small hole through the center, though no hole is the same size as another, and each vertex is decorated with a tiny bauble – though apart from that, the little doodads seem to have no distinctive markings at all.

We can infer that they must have been important, at least to some of their owners, since several have been found among coin hoards and – the new example notwithstanding – hardly any show signs of the kind of wear and tear you might expect over nearly two millennia of history. 

And yet the simple fact is that nobody knows what Roman dodecahedra were actually used for. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that hundreds of them have been discovered, you’d never know they existed at all, since no record of them has ever been found in contemporary art or writing.

That hasn’t stopped people from theorizing. Perhaps the mysterious little objects were used as rangefinders or angle measurers, people have suggested, or maybe the Romans used them for astronomical predictions to aid in agriculture. Since the advent of YouTube, the idea that the dodecahedra were used as knitting aids has proved particularly popular – but since even knitting needles aren’t known in the historical record until a good few centuries later, that hypothesis is likely not true. 

Instead, archaeologists at the Flanders Heritage Agency favor a more esoteric explanation. “There is increasing evidence that dodecahedrons may not have been practical objects, such as measuring instruments,” the statement says. “The known specimens are too different in dimensions and details for that.”

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How Effective Are Police?

A 2020 paper published in the Alabama Law Review and written by Shima Baughman, professor of law at the University of Utah, puts paid to the illusion that cops solve crimes.

TV cops solve crimes. Real cops, not so much.

From the Abstract (emphasis added):

In recent years, the national conversation in criminal justice has centered on police. Are police using excessive force? Should they be monitored more closely? … The implied core question across these national debates is whether police are effective at their jobs. Yet we have not explored how effective police are or determined how best to measure police effectiveness.

This article endeavors to measure how effectively police perform at their core function — solving crime. The metric most commonly used to measure police effectiveness at crime solving is a “clearance rate”: the proportion of reported crimes for which police arrest a person and refer them for prosecution. But clearance rates are inadequate for many reasons, including the fact that they are highly manipulable. 

This Article therefore provides a set of new metrics that have never been used systematically to study police effectiveness — referred to as “criminal accountability” metrics. Criminal accountability examines the full course of a crime to determine whether police detect and ultimately resolve committed crime. Taking into account the prevalence and the number of crimes police solve, the proportion of crimes solved in America is dramatically lower than we realize. Only with a clearer conversation, rooted in accurate data about the effectiveness of the American police system, can we attempt a path toward increased criminal accountability and public safety.

She goes on to note that “the scholarly discussion has focused on how police are doing crime solving: With too much force? With the right monitoring? With proper technology? These discussions assume that police are solving crimes. The prior scholarship has also tackled police performance in specific arenas but has not examined how to measure whether police are effective at their jobs.”

The goal of the paper, then, is to answer the question, “What is the best way to determine police effectiveness?”

As the Abstract notes, using “clearance rates” is misleading. Clearance rate is defined as “the proportion of reported crime for which police arrest a person and refer them for prosecution.” Part of the problem with this metric is the amount of data it misses. For example:

How many individuals are victims of a crime but failed to report it to police? How often do police arrest the right people? Which crimes are police most likely to make arrests for? How many police clearances result in a conviction? How many crimes did police not make arrests for but resolved in other ways? None of this information is tracked [by the “clearance rate” metric].

The paper concludes that police, indeed, are remarkably ineffective at solving crime, their supposed primary function.

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Mysterious Antennas Are Appearing in Utah’s Hills and Officials Are Stumped

Strange antennas have appeared in the foothills around Salt Lake City and authorities have no idea what they are or who put them up.

As first reported by KSLTV 5 in Utah, people first began noticing the antennas a year ago. They’re simple machines made up of a LoRa fiberglass antenna, a locked battery pack, and a solar panel to power it. The Salt Lake City public lands department has been pulling them down as they find them, and told KSLTV that there have been as many as a dozen.

It’s illegal to place structures on public lands without permission and some of the antennas have appeared on steep peaks. In one instance, the removal of an antenna required a team of five people. Other antennas were found on land managed by the University of Utah and the Forest Service.

Tyler Fonarow, Salt Lake City’s recreational trails manager, told Motherboard that when the antennas were first noticed a year ago, “We didn’t really have the bandwidth to look into it or remove them,” he said.

Fonarow said that there were no identifying marks on the antennas and that they’d been bolted into the stone and required special tools to remove. “We honestly didn’t even open the box,” he said. “We just wanted it off the hill.”

“Our Trails team and Foothills rangers have found some unauthorized solar panel towers in the Foothills,” Salt Lake City Public Lands said in a post on Facebook. “If you have information about these towers or who they belong to, please call our office at (801) 972-7800 so we can return them back to their owner.”

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Why Was FBI Counter Intelligence Involved With The Seth Rich Case?

The stunning revelations from the Twitter files thanks to the work of Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss is providing irrefutable proof that the FBI was working to prevent the election of Donald Trump. When it comes to “Election Interference,” it was the FBI, not Russia.

The results released so far detail FBI giving direction to Twitter regarding the 2020 Presidential Campaign. I believe future releases will provide evidence that the FBI, along with the CIA, was working to destroy Donald Trump and prevent him from being elected.

One thing we know with certainty is that the FBI’s Washington Field Office was communicating via email and phone with the FBI Counter Intelligence division at FBI Headquarters about Seth Rich. The only reason the FBI Counter Intelligence division would be involved in any way with an alleged case of a routine murder following an attempted robbery of Seth Rich is because there was foreign involvement. The FBI is trying to bury that fact.

Why is the FBI stonewalling so furiously to keep its communications about Seth Rich and the alleged hack of the DNC by Russia secret? Because Russia did not hack the DNC. This is not my opinion. It is a conclusion of several cyber security professionals that flows from one very specific, easily tested claim made by the discredited Special Counsel, Robert Mueller –- i.e., that Guccifer 2.0 was a fictional identity created by Russian Military Intelligence, aka the GRU. If the GRU had concocted Guccifer 2.0, then the forensic evidence should show that this entity was operating from Russia or under the direct control of entities linked to the GRU.

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Human heart found in Tennessee salt pile, authorities say

A human heart was found in a salt pile at a Tennessee Department of Transportation facility, according to authorities.

Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis, a worker with the Tennessee Department of Transportation discovered the adult male human heart in a salt pile at the facility, which is located off Highway 70 East in Nashville.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has joined the investigation for examination and testing.

“At the request of 23rd Judicial District Attorney General Ray Crouch, TBI special agents are working along with deputies with the Humphreys County Sheriff’s Office, in investigating the discovery of a human heart in a TDOT salt facility in McEwen Thursday,” the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation noted in a statement. “An initial examination of the heart determined that it was that of an adult male. Additional DNA testing will be performed to try to determine its origin.”

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Murdered Delphi teens were intended victims of ‘botched’ child sex kidnap plot, cops believe – as investigators dig up DEAD CAT to match hairs found on girls to alleged killer’s pet

Murdered Delphi teenagers Liberty German and Abigail Williams were victims of a botched kidnapping plot hatched by members of a local pedophile ring.

This is just one of a host of disturbing new details and allegations that can be exclusively revealed by DailyMail.com – including gruesome details about how the girls died, and that police dug up the prime suspect’s dead cat, in an effort to match hairs found on their bodies.

The revelations come just two weeks after authorities released a redacted version of the probable cause affidavit that led to Richard Allen’s arrest.

Allen, 50, was charged on two counts of murder on October 28, five years after 14-year-old Libby and 13-year-old Abby were found dead in Delphi, Indiana, on February 13, 2017.  

DailyMail.com has learned that, shortly after his arrest, one of Allen’s neighbors recalled seeing police digging in his yard.

Now, DailyMail.com has been told they were digging up the family’s dead cat, whose hair proved a match for the samples found on one of the victims.

Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland has openly stated that he believes ‘Allen is not the only actor involved in this.’ 

And while Allen has not been charged with kidnapping, prosecutors have alleged he attempted it.

Now sources close to the investigation have claimed that Allen was acting with at least two other men and was involved in a child sex ring.

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Online Sleuths Notice Figures Walking in Background of Video Taken Near Idaho Crime Scene

Eagle-eyed online observers noticed a detail that authorities may have missed in previously dismissed bodycam video, showing cops stopping suspected underage drinkers on the morning of the Idaho student murders. 

Multiple shadowy figures can be seen walking in the background of the footage, which was shot at around 3 a.m. on November 13, merely a 10th of a mile from the home where four University of Idaho students were murdered.

The students who were stopped by the officers were uninvolved in the crime, and investigators have said that the footage was of no evidentiary value to investigators, police have said. 

Online sleuths, however, have noticed several people walking in the vicinity of two houses down from the off-campus home where Madison Mogen, 21; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Ethan Chapin, 20; and his girlfriend Xana Kernodle, 20, were stabbed to death between 3 and 4 a.m. The bodycam clip is stamped at 3:12 a.m.

Local law enforcement and the FBI did not confirm if they had identified or interviewed the people captured walking in the videos, Fox News said. The news outlet made several inquiries about the images, but did not receive a response. 

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Reward for Tips on Unsolved Murders of Billionaire Toronto Couple Upped to $35M

Five years after the mysterious, unsolved double homicide of billionaire Toronto couple Barry and Honey Sherman, their son has added $25 million to the original $10 million offered for information leading to his parents’ killer.

“Closure will not be possible until those responsible for this evil act are brought to justice,” said Jonathon Sherman in a Dec. 12 statement to CBC News.

On Dec. 15, 2017, the bodies of Barry Sherman, 75, and his wife Honey, 70, who were among Canada’s wealthiest couples, were found by a realtor touring their mansion that was listed for sale at the time. They were found strangled and strangely posed in their mansion at 50 Colony Road. Active in the Toronto Jewish community, they were well-known philanthropists who gave millions of dollars to hospitals, universities, and Jewish organizations.

The Shermans were last seen alive on the evening of Dec. 13, 2017. The murders were believed to have taken place shortly after. Police said that there was no sign of forced entry and little DNA evidence, and that both died of “ligature neck compression.”

To date, police have not arrested any suspects. One year ago, Toronto Police released a short, 22-second video clip of a suspect who was captured on video walking on the sidewalk near the Shermans’ mansion on Dec. 13, 2017.

Police have reportedly conducted at least 250 witness interviews, received 1,255 tips from the public, and obtained 41 warrants since the start of the investigation.

Barry Sherman, with a net worth estimated at between $5 billion and $10 billion, was the founder of pharmaceutical giant Apotex, the largest manufacturer of generic drugs in Canada, and the only company that produces hydroxychloroquine, the controversial drug some medical experts used to treat COVID-19. During the pandemic, some countries added the product to their treatment protocols, according to a statement made by Apotex on March 20, 2020.

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