Tag: unsolved mysteries

Arkansas State Police release police sketch of ‘person of interest’ in murder of couple at Devil’s Den Park

Arkansas State Police have released a sketch drawing of a person of interest in their search for the killer of a couple at Devil’s Den State Park. Their two young daughters, who were innocent bystanders at the time of the killings, were fortunately left unharmed.

On Monday, the department recently released a composite sketch depicting a man wearing a baseball hat. Police referred to the unidentified man as the “person of interest” in the case who was last seen in the park at the time of the murders.

Authorities described the suspect as a “White male with a medium build, who was seen wearing a long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, dark pants, a dark ballcap, sunglasses and fingerless gloves who was also carrying a black backpack.”

Police noted that the suspect had been seen “driving toward a park exit in a black, four-door sedan” – possibly a Mazda with tape covering the license plate. The vehicle may have also been traveling on State Route 170 or 220, they added.

Keep reading

Police search for suspect in killing of couple hiking with daughters at Arkansas park

Police are searching for a suspect in the deaths of a couple who were attacked on a trail in Arkansas on Saturday while walking with their two daughters, according to investigators.

Clinton David Brink, 43, and Cristen Amanda Brink, 41, were found dead at Devil’s Den State Park in Washington County in a suspected double homicide, Arkansas State Police (ASP) said. Their daughters, ages 7 and 9, were not injured and are now safely with family members.

Police added that the couple had recently moved to Prairie Grove from out of state.

Investigators asked that anyone who visited the park on Saturday check their cellphone photos and videos or GoPro footage for any images of the suspect.

They also want any individuals who live in the vicinity of the park to notify ASP if they have access to security and game camera footage.

Officials described the suspect as a white man wearing dark shorts, a dark ballcap, sunglasses and fingerless gloves. He was seen driving towards the park exit in a black four-door sedan, believed to be a Mazda, with a license plate that may be covered by electrical or duct tape.

Keep reading

‘American Idol’ boss, husband executed in their $4.5 million home in gory double murder

A boss on “American Idol” and her husband were executed in a suspected double murder inside their $4.5 million Los Angeles home, cops said.

Robin Kaye, an award-winning music supervisor for the hit competition show, was found slaughtered along with her musician husband, Thomas Deluca, after an apparent break-in at their house in the upscale Encino neighborhood, a Los Angeles Police Department source told TMZ.

Both were 70.

The couple’s bodies were found during a “welfare check” Monday afternoon after they had not been heard from in four days, the LAPD said.

Both victims had what appeared to be gunshot wounds to the head. 

“There is no suspect information at this time. LAFD responded and pronounced the victims deceased at scene. The motive is unknown. The investigation is ongoing,” the department told The Post.

Kaye was found dead in the pantry, and Deluca in the bathroom, NBC Los Angeles reported.

Officers also found blood in the entryway and a broken window, which the killer possibly used to get inside.

The home was apparently not ransacked, pointing away from the possibility of a burglary, authorities told TMZ.

Aerial footage of the house from ABC 7 showed what looked like a smashed sliding glass door.

The cops were called to the house Thursday after neighbors spotted a suspicious person hopping the fence, but officers found no evidence of foul play.

Keep reading

This Russian radio signal might end the world. Scared? Maybe you should be

At 4625 kHz, a dull mechanical buzz echoes endlessly – day and night, winter and summer, across borders and decades. The sound is steady, almost hypnotic. Sometimes it falters. A brief pause. Then a voice emerges through the static: “I am 143. Not receiving any response.”

Then – silence. And the buzz resumes.

No one has officially claimed responsibility for the transmission. There are no station identifications, no explanations, and no confirmed purpose. But it’s been broadcasting, almost without interruption, since the late 1970s. Radio enthusiasts around the world call it ‘The Buzzer’.

Over the years, the signal has inspired a growing mythology. Some believe it’s part of a Soviet-era dead man’s switch – a last-resort nuclear system designed to retaliate automatically if Russia’s leadership is wiped out. Others think it might be a tool for communicating with spies, or perhaps even extraterrestrials. Theories range from the plausible to the absurd.

Echoes from the Deep

Like all good Cold War mysteries, its real power lies not in what we know – but in what we don’t.

Like the Kola Superdeep Borehole – the real Soviet drilling project that inspired urban legends about ‘sounds from hell’ – The Buzzer lives in that fertile twilight between fact and fiction, secrecy and speculation.

In the West, Cold War history is often well-documented and declassified. But Soviet-era experiments remain buried under layers of myth, rumor, and deliberate silence. That opacity has given rise to a unique genre of post-Soviet folklore – eerie, atmospheric, and deeply compelling.

And few stories illustrate that better than the one about a drilling rig in the icy Siberian tundra, a descent into the Earth’s crust, and a scream from the abyss.

Keep reading

Revealed: Mystery donor who paid £1,300 fine that freed lead Madelaine McCann suspect is a former police officer investigating him – as she blames ‘misunderstanding’

The mystery donor who paid the £1,300 court fine that has paved the way a key suspect in the Madeleine McCann‘s case to walk free has been identified as a former police officer. 

The woman, who has not been named, claims to have formerly been involved in wire-tapping the jail cell of paedophile Christian Brueckner, The Sun reported. 

Brueckner is the main suspect in the unsolved disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who vanished from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007.

The 48-year-old is currently serving a seven-year jail sentence in Germany for the 2005 rape of an American woman, then 72, in the same Algarve resort where Maddie went missing. 

The woman who paid the fine is said to be a former member of the BKA, the German equivalent of the FBI. 

She told German newspaper Der Spiegel that she was the person responsible for settling Brueckner’s oustanding balance with the courts – but claims her decision to do so was based on a ‘misunderstanding’. 

Until now the convicted rapist was only able to raise £210 of the total amount owed, meaning he was set to remain in jail until January 2026. 

However thanks to the former officer’s intervention Brueckner is now set to be released on September 17 this year – three weeks time.

The former police officer’s actions appear to undermine her former employer, with German police still seeking to find forensic evidence to charge Christian Brueckner with Maddy’s disappearance. 

The woman, who claims to work in ‘Operative Technology Audio’, says that she was previously reponsible for bugging the paedophile’s jail cell.

However, she reportedly thought that the outstanding fine was due only to Brueckner insulting a police officer – a charge she said ‘wasn’t justified’. 

She claims that by the time she learnt that the financial penalties related to a number of more serious infringemnts, including bodily harm, it was too late.

The woman told Der Spiegel that the payment was a ‘misunderstanding’ and that she had attempted to reverse it, but to no avail. 

The reasons for paying the fine appear bizarre, but the former officer alleges that she has ‘never had any personal contact with Christian B’.

The German newspaper was, however, able to confirm that she had transferred the total sum – £1,300 – into an account belonging to the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office. 

The payment covered outstanding fines on Brueckner’s record, including a 2016 charge for drunkenness in traffic and forgery of documents and another from 2017 for assault.

Keep reading

Families plead for answers in the mystery of the Yuba County Five almost 50 years later

The Plumas National Forest has held the mystery of the Yuba County Five for almost 50 years. Their disappearance has puzzled people around the world.

The five men, who lived with intellectual disabilities, were known as “the boys.” They were Ted Weiher, Jack Huett, Bill Sterling, Jack Madruga and Gary Mathias. 

“Madruga was from Yuba City and everybody else lived in Yuba County in the Olivehurst area,” said Brian Bernardis with the Yuba County Sheriff’s Office.

Dallas and Perry Weiher remember their brother Ted as a gentle giant. Tony Wright, the author of “Things Aren’t Right: The Disappearance of the Yuba County Five,” describes the other boys as very active and friends who loved to spend time together.

“You had Jack Madruga who was 30 years old. He was a very quiet introverted person but very very smart, very kind and loving. That’s how he was remembered by his family. Bill Sterling was 29. He was a very avid bowler, he too was an athletic individual known for being very sweet individual. There was Gary Mathias who was 25 years old. He was very athletic, known as a great brother, he was a musician who played in a rock band in high school, was a great harmonica player, spent time in the military. And then there was Jackie Huett. He was 24 years old. He was a great friend. A very loving person. Very kind, very sweet,” said Wright.

The boys met in the 70s on a basketball team for a Yuba County nonprofit helping people with disabilities. They followed UC Davis basketball and on Feb. 24, 1978, the five men piled into Madruga’s car to watch a college basketball team in Chico.

“I think it was Chico State and UC Davis. Davis was their kind of home team. They really want to see them do well so they had traveled this before. It wasn’t the first time for him, so he was familiar with the territory,” said Bernardis.

Bernardis, the cold case investigator for the Yuba County Sheriff’s Office, says there’s no doubt the boys made it to the game. 

“The editor of the Chico newspaper actually recalls seeing the five of them there where they were because they were kind of out away from everybody else. There was something very distinctive about them,” said Bernardis.

They stopped at a convenience store in Chico after the game.

“Their next reported appearance would have been at the Behr Market not too far from the college. They’d stopped in there and picked up candies and cakes and milks,” said Bernardis.

But what happened next still puzzles law enforcement agencies today.

“We know nothing. From that point, we know nothing. They literally disappeared into nowhere,” said Bernardis.

They vanished without a trace and their families reported them missing the next day.

“That night they were saying, ‘Well, they’re grown boys, they can go do what they want. They’re not lost or anything.’ Well, those weren’t normal grown boys. They were different boys,” said Perry.

“Back then they, that small town, small community, everybody knew everybody. It paid a large impact on how they responded and how they felt about the case,” said Bernardis.

The five men had big plans to play in a basketball tournament the following day. The prize for the winning team was tickets to Disneyland.

“These men were not going to miss that basketball game for any reason. It was of utmost importance and they were going to get home come hell or high water,” said Wright.

Jack Madruga’s car was found in the snow on the Oroville Quincy Highway in Butte County four days later — about 70 miles in the wrong direction from home. ABC10 asked what condition the car was found in.

“It was intact and undamaged? (The) best way to describe it. It was abandoned for lack of a better term. Windows were down or at least one of the windows were down. The candies and milk and things that they’d purchased at the store; those wrappers were in the car. There were some maps that were found in the car which Madruga was kind of a map student, so nothing would indicate that there was any foul play or some type of heinous act that occurred,” said Bernardis.

A massive search followed near where the car was found.

“So now you have Yuba and Butte counties both working the case. They brought in snow equipment so they could travel across the snow and search the area looking for the guys. They’d spent a couple of days, but then that was a very bad snow year and the weather came in and put a complete halt to any efforts to look further,” said Bernardis.

Families searched for their missing loved ones for days on end. Detectives wouldn’t get a break in the case until about three-and-a-half months later.

Motorcyclists off-roading near a rural Plumas County campground came upon some portable buildings used for fire crews during fire season. They found a broken window and went to take a closer look.

“When they opened the door, the smell of decomposition was pretty intense and they realized that something significant was in there and they found a body, a human body in there on a bed. So that was four months after the disappearance, a little less,” said Bernardis.

It was Ted Weiher’s.

Keep reading

“We Have Finally Found the Last Piece of the Puzzle”: Scientists Solve a Long-Standing Seismic Mystery

A seismic mystery has been solved as earthquake waves, traveling almost 3,000 kilometers below ground and demonstrating anomalous behavior in their rush toward the planet’s center, have now been explained with the help of observational data.

ETH Zurich Professor of Experimental Mineral Physics Motohiko Murakami led the new study, attempting to recreate the extreme conditions of the inner Earth. Their laboratory work demonstrated a unique rock flow, distinct from that of liquid lava or brittle solid rock.

The D” Layer Anomaly

The lowest part of Earth’s mantle, the D” layer, sits 2700 kilometers deep, just above the boundary with the planet’s core. Strangely, earthquake waves suddenly alter their behavior at this depth, increasing in speed. This acceleration would typically indicate that the waves had passed into an entirely different type of material, a long-standing seismic mystery that has baffled seismologists.

Murakami made an important discovery over two decades ago, when in 2004 he found that around the D” layer barrier, the primary mineral changes from the perovskite that makes up the rest of the lower mantle. This new “post-perovskite” mineral endures extreme temperatures and pressure at that depth.

For a few years, Murakami and his team believed that the change over to this post-perovskite mineral provided an explanation for the seismic acceleration. Yet, in 2007, Murakami uncovered further evidence that the mineral change was insufficient to account for the shift in earthquake waves.

It was a complex computer model that provided the researchers with the missing piece of the puzzle: post-perovskite hardness changes based on the direction that its crystals point. The cause of the acceleration appears to result from when all the minerals’ crystals become aligned in the same direction, a phenomenon that occurs at depths of around 2700 kilometers.  

“We have finally found the last piece of the puzzle,” Murakami recently said in a statement.

Laboratory Pressure

As their medium to simulate post-perovskite, the team synthesized pure MgGeO3 orthopyroxene by using an electric furnace to heat a mixture of fine-grain germanium oxide and magnesium oxide at 1000 °C for 104 hours. The resulting substance was placed under extreme pressure measured with diamond anvils and heated with a CO2 laser to recreate the intense conditions found in the D” layer. The researchers took high-pressure acoustic velocity and X-ray diffraction measurements, which were analyzed with multiple spectroscopic techniques.

The team’s laboratory work successfully recreated the formation needed for the acceleration observed at the edge of the D” layer, demonstrating that heat and pressure can align the crystals in one direction, where seismic waves speed up. This suggests that instead of a change in material causing the anomaly, a change in deformation is responsible for the effect.

Solving the Seismic Mystery

Exactly how these crystals manage to align in parallel relies on a type of movement long suspected by geoscientists, yet one that has been lacking direct evidence until now. The hypothesis is that a form of convection similar to the boiling of water allows the solid rock in the lower mantle to flow horizontally. Murakami’s team’s experiments have finally demonstrated this long-suggested convection action. 

Keep reading

Mysterious Cattle Deaths Baffle Colorado Rancher & Authorities

A macabre mystery involving the death of over a dozen cattle in a single day has stumped a Colorado rancher and state authorities investigating the case. The eerie incident reportedly occurred on May 8th at a property near the community of Coal Creek. That now-unforgettable day began when rancher Kerri Higgs and her husband discovered that a trio of cattle had inexplicably perished overnight. Concerned about the rest of their herd, they moved the remaining animals closer to an area near their home for observation. It was then that things took a weird and rather gruesome turn. “They started flopping over and dying,” Higgs recalled, “it was pretty bad.”

All told, the couple lost 15 cattle that fateful day, which prompted an exhaustive investigation by authorities that has come up short so far. To that end, tests of rainwater ingested by the animals, the soil where they roamed, and even the air around and above the property all produced no clues as to what could have killed so many creatures in such a short time. Blood tests from one of the downed cattle also only furthered the mystery. “We’re not getting any conclusive results,” Mykel Kroll of the county’s Office of Emergency Management explained, “we’re running out of boxes to check,” which has left authorities “scratching our heads.”

The futility of the investigation has understandably dismayed Higgs, who lamented that “it’s beyond frustrating.” Beyond the baffling nature of the incident, the cost of losing so many animals at once has devastated the ranch as each perished heifer was valued at around $5,000 or a staggering $60,000 total. While authorities pledged to continue investigating the case, samples from the downed cattle are beginning to dwindle, which raises the possibility that the mystery may never be solved. “Maybe we don’t find out the cause” of the curious event, Kroll conceded, musing “are there always answers? No.” For her part, Higgs acknowledged this dispiriting scenario, indicating that she “won’t be surprised” if the matter remains punctuated by a maddening question mark.

Keep reading

Third Teen Death in National Forest Alarms: Two High Schoolers Found Shot on Camping Trip

The tragic deaths of high school students Pandora Kjolsrud and Evan Clark have gripped the community, with their lives cut short in Tonto National Forest, Arizona. Both teenagers were found shot near Mount Ord, north of Mesa, and authorities have confirmed the investigation as a homicide. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office remains tight-lipped on the specifics, yet the gravity of the situation has left an indelible mark.

Arcadia High School students Kjolsrud and Clark were simply on a camping trip when their lives were tragically ended. This incident marks the second and third teenager deaths in the area since February. Earlier, the remains of 14-year-old Emily Pike were discovered, adding another layer of mystery and concern to the sequence of events.

Emily Pike’s disappearance from a group home in January ended with the grim discovery of her dismembered body. The distance of over 70 miles from her last known location to where she was found is chilling. Her case, still under investigation by the FBI and local law enforcement, has yet to see any arrests.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has not linked Pike’s case with the recent deaths of Kjolsrud and Clark. However, the community is on edge, yearning for answers and justice. Families are left to grapple with loss and the haunting questions that accompany such tragedies.

A GoFundMe campaign for Kjolsrud’s family highlights her vibrant spirit and the joy she spread. Her infectious smile left a lasting impact on those who knew her. The fundraiser paints a picture of a young woman who made everyone feel special, a testament to her remarkable character.

Evan Clark, remembered fondly by his mother, wasn’t your typical teenager. His entrepreneurial spirit and sensitivity set him apart. The touching letter he wrote to his mother on Mother’s Day is a poignant reminder of the depth of his love and the promise of a future now lost.

The community’s call for answers is echoed in the voices of those who knew and loved the teenagers. The proximity of this tragedy has left many feeling vulnerable and yearning for closure. The question of what happened that fateful day looms large in the hearts of those affected.

Keep reading

Two Teenagers Found Shot Dead in Arizona National Forest

Sheriff’s officials in Arizona are investigating the deaths of two high school students found in a national forest outside Phoenix after they failed to return from a Memorial Day camping trip.

Both had died from gunshot wounds, according to KNXV-TV, which cited the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

And both were being mourned by their families and their school community.

Pandora Kjolsrud, 18, was described by her mother in a message to KNXV-TV as “a bright light in this world who loved every single person she met and had an unusual ability to make every person she met feel special and loved. She was a friend to many and a beloved daughter. She lived life in a big way and was always up for an adventure.”

The other teen has been identified by family and friends as 17-year-old Evan Clark.

In an interview with KSAZ-TV, a co-worker of Clark’s called the deaths a “tragedy.”

“You just cherish all the memories and the laughs,” the co-worker said.  “His life was cut very short, and so was Pandora’s. They were very young, and it was just so sudden and a tragedy that you wouldn’t even imagine.”

A classmate of Clark’s told the station “it doesn’t really feel real.”

“I was just in class with him, not even a week ago,” the classmate said.

Keep reading