Tag: unsolved mysteries

Dig for D.B. Cooper Clues Conducted in Washington State

A D.B. Cooper researcher who believes that evidence from the legendary skyjacking case might still be hidden somewhere in the wilderness of Washington state conducted a dig this past weekend in search of new clues to the nearly five-decade-old mystery. According to a local media report, crime historian Eric Ullis spent Saturday and Sunday scouring a patch of land on the shore of the Columbia River for materials that may have been left behind by the still-unidentified individual behind the infamous caper. Known as the Tena Bar, this particular spot has long intrigued Cooper researchers as it was where $6,000 from the 1971 heist was discovered by a young boy back in 1980.

At the time of the remarkable find, the FBI purportedly searched the Tena Bar location for any additional evidence from the case, but only recovered a few additional scraps of the ill-gotten loot. However, Ullis believes that their investigation into the location may have been too narrowly focused on the spot where the money was discovered, causing them to miss other nearby areas of interest. To that end, the crime historian suspects that Cooper not only buried some of the money at the Tena Bar, but also stashed his parachutes and the attache case that he carried aboard the plane that fateful day.

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Reward increased to $50K in slaying of Fort Bragg paratrooper found beheaded: ‘The tragic death is a real mystery’

Army officials have increased the reward in the case of a Fort Bragg paratrooper whose partial remains were found along an Outer Banks seashore last year.

The Army Criminal Investigation Command increased the award in the homicide case of Spc. Enrique Roman-Martinez to $50,000, according to a news release issued this week.

“We are increasing the reward in the hopes of developing new credible leads to determine exactly what happened to our soldier,” CID special agent Steve Chancellor said in the news release. “We do not want to leave any stone unturned.”

Roman-Martinez, 21, of Chino, California, was reported missing May 23, 2020, at Cape Lookout National Seashore in Carteret County. His severed head washed ashore six days later.

At the time of his death, Roman-Martinez was a human resource specialist assigned to Headquarters Company, 37th Brigade Engineer Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division.

He joined the Army in September of 2016 and was assigned as a paratrooper to Fort Bragg in March 2017.

Roman-Martinez was last seen alive May 22, 2020, when he was camping with seven other soldiers, the Army CID’s news release states.

The release states that “agents have investigated suspected illegal drug use on the evening of May 22, 2020,” but does not indicate if any evidence was found to support that suspicion.

“Roman-Martinez’s friends reported him missing” the following evening, the news release states.

In an interview with The Fayetteville Observer in May, Roman-Martinez’s older sister, Griselda Martinez, said investigators have told the family there doesn’t seem to be a motive for the other soldiers her brother was camping with to harm him.

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6 strange military disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle

The “Bermuda Triangle” is a geographical area between Miami, Florida, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the tiny island nation of Bermuda. Nearly everyone who goes to the Bahamas can tell you that it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll die a horrible death.

Natural explanations usually range from compass problems, to changes in the Gulf Stream, or violent weather, the presence of methane hydrates, and to a large coincidence of human error. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a strange amount of disappearances that let the conspiracy theories gain some traction.

From 1946 to 1991, there have been over 100 disappearances. These are some of the military disappearances that have been lost in the Bermuda Triangle.

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75 years later, Navy “Flight 19” remains a mystery

It’s an enduring mystery in U.S. military lore and now, seven and half decades old and no closer to being solved.

It was December 5, 1945, less than four months after VJ Day marked the formal end of World War II. Five Navy Avenger torpedo bombers took off from the Naval Air Station in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

The planes — collectively known as “Flight 19” — were scheduled to fly a three-hour exercise between Florida, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, and back in an area that’s come to be known as the Bermuda Triangle.

As the weather deteriorated, radio contact became intermittent, and the planes just disappeared.

All 14 airmen on the flight were lost, as were all 13 crew members sent out to look for them in a search plane.

Twenty-seven souls in all just vanished without a trace.

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Who Killed the Nazi on Campus?

Of all the folks ambling around the folksy-cute rock-climbing community of Squamish, British Columbia, which is about 65 miles north of the U.S. border, no one is more perplexed by the unsolved 2017 murder of a onetime neo-Nazi troublemaker lunatic named Davis Wolfgang Hawke than his last girlfriend, Eva McLennan, who knew him only by how he first introduced himself, as Jesse James, avid vegan cragsman, adventurer, technologist, futurist, nutritionist, philosopher, writer, occasional poet, ex-officer in the Israeli Defense Force, and holder of a theoretical physics Ph.D. from Stanford. If that seems like a lot to take in, just imagine how it was for her. The guy she’d been in love with was pretty much just a spectral figment of his own imagination. Even his theoretical degree was purely theoretical.

The fullness of this realization didn’t happen right away. First came the murder, him found shot inside his 2000 GMC Yukon XL, which is where he lived, off a service road outside of town, digging the peripatetic so-called vanlife, the truck then torched such that you’d never know it was once bright red. All his gear vanished in the inferno, too — his climbing stuff, two phones, two laptops, a bunch of USB drives, everything. At the time, McLennan spent her nights in a tent a short distance away and stumbled upon the scene expecting only to enjoy another day of climbing the area’s many outcroppings and crags. Their last words to each other were “Good night, sweet dreams, I love you.” Instead, chaos and upheaval and death and cops.

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French Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Zodiac Killer’s Remaining Ciphers

An engineer in France believes that he has cracked the two remaining ciphers written by the infamous Zodiac Killer, but convincing other researchers has proven to be a far more difficult puzzle to solve. Back in December, Faycal Ziraoui reportedly became intrigued by the indecipherable missives said to have been penned by the serial killer and set about trying to unravel the mystery that has stumped researchers and experts for over 50 years. “I was obsessed with it, 24 hours a day, that’s all I could think about,” he recalled. Amazingly, Ziraoui claims to have managed to decode the messages in a mere two weeks, which understandably raised eyebrows in the often contentious world of Zodiac research.

After confidently posting his findings online, Ziraoui almost immediately found his work dismissed by highly skeptical individuals who have spent years studying the case. They largely argued that the two ciphers are simply too short to ever truly be confirmed at correctly decoded, since they consist of only 32 and 13 characters respectively. Dubious of that critique, Ziraoui’s brother postulated that the community of armchair researchers really took issue with the codes being cracked because “these people don’t want the game to end.” That said, beyond the online world, opinions of the engineer’s work is also divided as a pair of French cryptographers have lent credence to Ziraoui’s research, while a third argued that there are flaws with his methodology.

To that end, Ziraoui says that he based his process for decoding the letters on the much-heralded solution to a Zodiac cipher that was announced late last year. He proceeded to take the encryption key for that letter and applied it to the last remaining unsolved missives, dubbed Z32 and Z13. After using a few different cryptographic techniques, which he details in-depth on YouTube, Ziraoui ultimately came upon what he believes is the solution to the coded messages. Specifically, he says, one cipher contains coordinates for where the serial killer claimed to have hidden a bomb and the other actually reveals the name of the mysterious murderer. That individual, Ziraoui contends, was a man named Lawrence Kaye, who has long been considered a Zodiac suspect by one faction of the research community.

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Former Republican Lawmaker Shot Dead

A former Republican Mississippi lawmaker was found, shot dead, outside the burned home where her sister-in-law’s  body was found in December.

The former lawmaker, Ashley Henley, was shot in the back of the head as she was believed to be mowing her lawn, The Daily Mail reported.

The 40-year-old’s sister-in-law Kristina Michelle Jones was found dead in a burnt out trailer at the property in rural Yalobusha County, about 70 miles south of DeSoto County, in December last year, and Henley and her husband Brandon were convinced she was murdered.

Henley was at the property – where the couple have erected a large sign with pictures of Jones picture saying ‘I was Murdered’ as part of their campaign – on Sunday when she was killed.

Her body was found at about 10pm. She leaves behind a 15-year-old son.

Police have not formally linked the two deaths but Brandon Henley said he believed his sister and wife may have been killed by the same person. 

“’I feel that if something would have been done sooner this would have never happened,” he said to WJTV.

“I’d like for [the police] to do their job because this is the second person someone down there has taken from me. My son doesn’t have a mother,” he said.

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Millionaire couple found dead on Thailand’s notorious Death Island

This idyllic island in Thailand has long been popular with tourists for its pristine beaches, kaleidoscopic coral reefs and turquoise waters.

In recent years, however, the unexplained deaths and disappearances of many of those tourists have earned it a reputation as a death trap.

And it’s just claimed another two victims.

A millionaire hotel tycoon and his wife have been found dead in a luxury resort on Koh Tao, colloquially known as Death Island.

Their bodies were found floating in the resort’s pool last Friday, just hours after they checked in.

Disturbingly, police on the island have said CCTV cameras at luxury Jamahkiri Resort and Spa “weren’t working” on the day the couple died, fuelling mystery around what happened to the wealthy pair.

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How 1,600 People Went Missing from Our Public Lands Without a Trace

I first stepped through the missing-­persons portal back in 1997, when researching updates on Amy Wroe Bechtel, a runner who’d vanished in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, where I lived.

My intrigue only grew. I tend toward insomnia and the analog, and each night in bed I listen with earbuds to Coast to Coast AM on a tiny radio. The program, which explores all sorts of mysteries of the paranormal, airs from 1 to 5 a.m. in my time zone. It’s syndicated on over 600 stations and boasts ­nearly three million listeners each week. Most of the time, the talk of space aliens and ghosts lulls me to sleep, but not when my favorite guest, David Paulides, is at the mic. 

Paulides, an ex-cop from San Jose, California, is the founder of the North America Bigfoot Search. His obsession shifted from Sasquatch to missing persons when, he says, he was visited at his motel near an unnamed national park by two out-of-­uniform rangers who claimed that something strange was going on with the number of people missing in America’s national parks. (He wouldn’t tell me the place or even the year, “for fear the Park Service will try to put the pieces together and ID them.”) So in 2011, Paulides launched the CanAm Missing Project, which catalogs cases of people who disappear—or are found—on wildlands across North America under what he calls mysterious circumstances. He has self-published six volumes in his popular Missing 411 series, most recently Missing 411 Hunters: Unexplained Disappearances. Paulides expects Missing 411: The Movie, a ­documentary codirected by his son, Ben, and featuring Survivorman Les Stroud, to be released this year.

Last May, I met him at a pizza joint in downtown ­Golden. The gym-fit Paulides, who moved from California to Colorado in part for the skiing, is right out of central casting for a detective film. 

“I don’t put any theories in the books—I just connect facts,” he told me. Under “unique factors of disappearances,” he lists such ­recurring characteristics as dogs unable to track scents, the time (late afternoon is a popular window to vanish), and that many victims are found with clothing and footwear removed. Bodies are also discovered in previously searched areas with odd fre­quency, ­sometimes right along the trail. Children—and remains—are occasionally found improbable ­distances from the point last seen, in improbable ­terrain. 

It’s tempting to dismiss Paulides as a crypto-kook—and some search and rescue professionals do—but his books are extensively researched. On a large map of North America on his office wall,

Paulides has identified 59 clusters of people missing on federal wildlands in the U.S. and southern Canada. To qualify as a cluster, there must be at least four cases; according to his pins, you want to watch your step in Yosemite, Crater Lake, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Rocky Mountain National Parks. But then, it would seem you want to watch your step everywhere in the wild. The map resembles a game of pin the tail on the donkey at an amphetamine-fueled birthday party. 

Paulides has spent hundreds of hours writing letters and Freedom of Information Act requests in an attempt to break through National Park Service red tape. He believes the Park Service in particular knows exactly how many people are missing but won’t release the information for fear that the sheer numbers—and the ways in which people went missing—would shock the public so badly that visitor numbers would go down. 

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