Tag: unsolved mysteries

Cops finally reopen ‘suicide’ case of 27-year-old Philadelphia teacher found by fiancé in her apartment with 20 stab wounds – including ten to the BACK of her head

Investigators are reviewing evidence from the crime scene of a 27-year-old teacher from Philadelphia they say may have been staged to appear as a suicide nearly a decade ago.

Ellen Greenberg was found in her kitchen apartment with 20 stab wounds on January 26, 2011, by her fiancé Sam Goldberg.

Her death was initially ruled as a homicide before Medical Examiner Marlon Osbourne changed it to suicide.

Greenberg had 10 stab wounds to the neck and back of the head, with an additional 10 to her stomach, abdomen, and chest. A knife was still plunged into her heart.

The case has since been handed to the Chester District Attorney’s Office for re-review as evidence suggests the crime scene was staged based on the position her body was found and the angle of dry blood across her face.

‘In all my years of experience, and all of the homicides that I’ve done, and suicides, I’ve never seen anything like this,’ forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht told Fox News Digital as he claimed suicide is ‘highly unlikely.’

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Destruction of the Georgia Guidestones, a monument puzzling from the start, only has heightened the mystery

Atop a windswept hill in rural Georgia stood a 19-foot, 3-inch-high granite monument with a series of instructions for living in a future “age of reason.” 

Unveiled in 1980 near Elberton, about 100 miles northeast of Atlanta, the Georgia Guidestones have been shrouded in mystery and the center of controversy for decades. The true identity of the man who commissioned the monoliths and the meaning behind its cryptic 10-part message inscribed in eight languages remain unknown.  

The mystery of the Guidestones’ destruction now adds to that lore. The monument, dubbed “America’s Stonehenge” by some and “satanic” by others, was blown up last month by an unidentified person.  

But the Guidestones – or pieces of them, anyway – have found a new home. 

This month, the Elbert County Board of Commissioners voted to give the remains of the monument to the Elberton Granite Association. The group, which runs the Elberton Granite Museum, agreed to take the stones, but they’ve yet to determine a new home, said Elbert Granite Association Executive Vice President Christopher Kubas. 

“The only options (the Elbert County Board of Commissioners) had were to basically destroy them completely and be done with them or they could donate them,” Kubas said. “We agreed to take the stones in an effort to preserve them, mostly because the monument was really a testament to the type of work that we do here in Elberton in manufacturing granite monuments and memorials.” 

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Nearly Half of Murders Now Go Unsolved in America, The Lowest Clearance Rate on Record

Welcome to the New America™.

From CBS News, “A ‘coin flip’: Nearly half of U.S. murders go unsolved as cases rise”:

Across a nation that is already in the grips of a rise in violent crime, murders are going unsolved at a historic pace, a CBS News investigation has found. A review of FBI statistics shows that the murder clearance rate — the share of cases each year that are solved, meaning police make an arrest or close the case due to other reasons — has fallen to its lowest point in more than half a century.

“It’s a 50-50 coin flip,” says Thomas Hargrove, who runs the Murder Accountability Project, which tracks unsolved murders nationwide. “It’s never been this bad. During the last seven months of 2020, most murders went unsolved. That’s never happened before in America.”

Police are far less likely to solve a murder when the victim is Black or Hispanic, according to CBS News’ analysis. In 2020, the murders of White victims were about 30% more likely to be solved than in cases with Hispanic victims, and about 50% more than when the victims were Black, the data show.

In dozens of interviews across the country, police and criminal justice experts have offered a range of explanations for these trends.

They’ve got to find some way to blame white people.

Check out the roundabout way they addressed the real issue: snitches get stitches.

Some factors are evident when visiting communities such as Jackson, Mississippi, which has suffered from one of the nation’s highest murder rates.

In that city of about 160,000 people, the police department responded to 153 murders in the past year but has just eight homicide detectives to work that caseload. FBI guidelines suggest homicide detectives should be covering no more than five cases at a time.

Police Chief James Davis said his department needs more of everything to keep up with the violence.

“The whole system is backlogged,” Davis said. “I could use more police officers. I could use more homicide detectives, but if the state is backed up, the court is backed up, we will still have the same problem by developing these cases that we’re already doing.”

Police are also contending with a breakdown in trust between their officers and the communities they serve, a result of decades of tensions that spilled over during high-profile cases of police misconduct in recent years.

That has made it harder for police to receive tips or obtain help from witnesses, said Danielle Outlaw, the commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department. Outlaw told CBS News there is a history of “systemic inequities that contribute to the mistrust” in many communities most affected by crime.

Gee, I wonder what could have caused this breakdown in trust?

Was there some sort of “Movement” in 2020 that came to a head which said police are all evil white racists who are oppressing black people for no reason whatsoever other than the color of their skin?

Did police and the FBI decide to take a knee and blame white people for all of society’s ills rather than address our serious “inner city” crime problem?

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We Tried to Solve the Mystery of the QAnon Postcards Flooding American Mailboxes

In the last week of March and the first week of April, residents in and around Boston and across New Hampshire received a strange postcard in the mail. 

The postcard featured a grid of images of famous figures, including Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, Mel Gibson, Dave Chappelle, and Elon Musk.

At the center of the grid was the phrase “The True Story of QAnon” alongside a QR code that linked to a website containing an unhinged conspiratorial diatribe filled with references to hundreds of Hollywood celebrities, lawmakers, and figures from Silicon Valley.

On the other side of the card, the sender claimed they were “a child victim of the Cabal spoken of in QAnon.”

“They invented the whole saga of QAnon and planned all news and entertainment events 20 years ago,” the postcard read. “They planned 9/11, the 7/7 bombing, the Ukraine war, and Covid-19 and they told me that Luvox cures Covid-19.” The message ends by telling recipients that ”on Good Friday this world will end, possibly by nukes, or MY world will end.” 

The postcard was not signed and contained no identifying information beyond an anonymous email address and a return address of a post office box in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 

Several reports covered the phenomenon, and many posted about it on social media. The United States Postal Service even issued a statement to say that while the contents of the postcards might be controversial, there was nothing illegal about them.

Soon after, however, online chatter slowed down and the trail went cold, with no one knowing where the postcards came from, who sent them, or why.

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Chilling new details of unsolved Delphi Bridge Murders reveal teenage victims died in bloodbath, murderer took ‘souvenir’ and that he ‘moved and staged’ corpses for cops to find: Local man linked to killings died in January

The victims of a notorious unsolved 2017 murder were found covered in blood – and their killer took a twisted souvenir, a search warrant has revealed.

Delphi Bridge murder victims Abby Williams, 13, and Libby German, 14, were found to have lost a large amount of blood when discovered dead close to an Indiana hiking trail in February 2017.

‘A large amount of blood was lost by the victims at the crime scene,’ an FBI search warrant read. It did not note how the girls had been wounded, but noted that there were no signs of a ‘struggle or fight.’

The warrant, obtained by the Murder Sheet podcast and released to Indianapolis FOX59, offered no further information on a murder weapon or cause of death.

Police have never disclosed how the two friends died after being stalked by their killer on a hiking trail, with information on the bloody crime scene offering a gruesome new detail. 

Their killer likely got his victims’ blood on his clothes, the warrant also revealed, although no-one has ever been charged with the double-homicide. 

Indiana State Police said in February they know who killed the girls, but say they have insufficient evidence to make an arrest.  

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Dead deputy probable suspect in 1983 murder of 11-year-old girl

St. Lucie County Chief Deputy Brian Hester announced Thursday that they have closed the 1983 cold case murder of 11-year-old Lora Ann Huizar.

Based on information obtained during the investigation, detectives have named former deputy James Howard Harrison as the only probable suspect in this case. The sheriff’s office is unable to pursue charges against Harrison because he died in 2008.

“We have established probable cause to determine that Harrison abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered the juvenile victim and later altered the crime scene by placing the victim in a drainage ditch in an attempt to destroy physical evidence,” said Chief Deputy Brian Hester.

On Nov. 6, 1983, a uniformed patrol deputy, later confirmed to be Harrison, observed Huizar walking toward her home from a local gas station around the time of her disappearance.

On Nov. 9, 1983, deputies recovered Huizar’s body nearby.

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‘Darkness Enveloped My Soul’: The Final Confessions of the Torso Killer

Jennifer Weiss says her life came full-circle in a massive, dreary building in Trenton, New Jersey. In May of 1978, her mother, Deedeh Goodarzi, put her up for adoption at an agency in the shadow of the New Jersey State Prison and its barbed-wire crowned fences. Decades later, she found herself at that same prison, confronting the man who had left her mother dismembered in a flaming hotel room in Times Square: Richard Cottingham, a.k.a. the Torso Killer, a man whose brutality towards his victims shocked even the most seasoned of cops.

“I wanted to find her. I didn’t want to ever have to try to find her skull,” Weiss says of her mother, whose identity she says she uncovered in 2003, when she was in her early twenties. “I was expecting to get the other half of the locket like Annie… and it was not the case.”

Weiss first met Cottingham through a sheet of glass for a window visit and was shocked to discover that she wasn’t scared of the man before her, who resembled Santa gone to seed. “I was trying to figure out pieces of my mother’s life and where her remains were,” she says. And he had the answers.

Cottingham, now 75, has spent the last four decades in relative obscurity, watching hours of police procedurals and detective shows behind bars as he slid into his seventies and his health hit a steady decline. Over the last decade or so, however, the killer — who has been convicted of eight murders  — has been slowly confessing to a series of cold cases. How these confessions came about is highly contested, though: Former Chief of Detectives for the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office Robert Anzilotti would say he’s responsible for wearing Cottingham down over the years, while Weiss and her friend, serial killer expert Dr. Peter Vronsky, claim it’s her unlikely, uncomfortable relationship with Cottingham that has helped grease the gears. Cottingham, who wrote to Rolling Stone from South Woods State Prison for his first published interview in more than 10 years, credits both, seeming to play his confidantes against each other even behind bars.

Credit aside, it’s not been an easy path when it comes to getting confessions out of Cottingham. Whether it’s his failing memory, the police’s interdepartmental politics, or Cottingham’s lust for manipulation, it’s become a proverbial race against time to get his alleged crimes put to paper — according to Cottingham himself, he has roughly 70 to 90 murders to go.

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American Diplomats In Geneva, Paris Fall Victim To “Havana Syndrome”

More cases of ‘Havana Syndrome’ have just been reported at American embassies in Geneva and Paris, WSJ reports. Officials employed at both facilities have been afflicted by the neurological attacks, and at least one victim was evacuated back to the US for treatment.

Like most prior reports on Havana Syndrome attacks, this one comes with a significant delay: the attacks were first reported internally last summer, and quickly made their way to the State Department back in Washington. At least three cases of the syndrome were reported in Geneva, and there was at least one in Paris, WSJ said, bringing the total number of Havana Syndrome victims to close to 200.

While the Biden Administration’s State Department insists on calling the attacks “anomalous health incidents,” the CIA doesn’t mince words. The “attacks” continue to befuddle America’s best analysts. Nobody has a clear idea of what’s causing them, or who might be behind it. Scientists have blamed crickets in Havana, and – as we mentioned above – those dastardly Russians. Yet, five years after the attacks started, the US appears no closer to the truth.

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