Tag: unsolved mysteries

The Mysterious Dodecahedrons of the Roman Empire

IN THE FIRST EPISODE OF Buck Rogers, the 1980s television series about an astronaut from the present marooned in the 25th century, our hero visits a museum of the future. A staff member brandishes a mid-20th-century hair dryer. “Early hand laser,” he opines. As an observation of how common knowledge gets lost over time, it’s both funny and poignant. Because our museums also stock items from the past that completely baffle the experts.

Few are as intriguing as the hundred or so Roman dodecahedrons that we have found. We know next to nothing about these mysterious objects—so little, in fact, that the various theories about their meaning and function are themselves a source of entertainment.

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Zoraida Bartolomei and Alberto Rolon – the Chicago couple shot dead with their two sons and three dogs in mysterious massacre – as cops hunt gunman and the victim’s sister pleads for ‘answers’ about ‘horrific crime’

The family of four who were massacred in their Illinois home along with their three dogs have been pictured for the first time as cops continue to hunt for the killer. 

Zoraida Bartolomei, 32, her husband Alberto Rolon – also known as Roberto – and their children Adriel, 10, and Diego, seven, were shot in their family bungalow in Romeoville, a suburb of Chicago, on Sunday.

Romeoville Police Department investigators have ruled out a murder-suicide and warned the murderer is still on the loose.

Their family said they have no idea why anyone would want to kill them, and Zoraida’s devastated sister has issued a plea for answers.

Sharing a photograph of the family on Facebook, Bryana Bartolomei said: ‘I want to know what happened to my nephews, my sister, her husband, and WHY?

‘They were shot and killed in their home.’ 

The picture shows Zoraida and Alberto beaming with their two sons, one playfully holding a strand of his mother’s hair.

A fundraiser created to cover funeral expenses was created on Monday, describing their children as ‘the sweetest most innocent angels’.

Friends described them as ‘hardworking people that had just bought their first home’.

‘Their kids were the sweetest most innocent angels who could hug your worries away,’ the fundraiser says.

‘In just a few hours their lives, their family’s lives completely changed. The world is going to be a much dimmer place without them.’

They pleaded for anyone with information about the gunman to contact police.

Zoraida’s mother Lydia from Puerto Rico earlier told DailyMail.com they were ‘so happy’ and had only bought their $250,000 Romeoville home five months ago. 

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Inside The Bizarre Murder Of Blair Adams — And Why It Remains Unsolved Decades Later

Blair Adams’ trip to Tennessee made as much sense as the way he died – very little.

To his family and friends in British Columbia, Canada, Adams wasn’t himself, acting oddly, and displaying paranoid behavior. On Friday, July 5, 1996, Adams withdrew almost all the cash from his bank account and the entire contents of his safety deposit box. Believing someone wanted him dead, Adams fled to the United States.

Adams decided to enter the U.S. that day by attempting to drive onto a ferry from Victoria to Seattle, but he was denied entry by immigration officials for traveling with large amounts of cash and valuables, and for lying about his criminal history over drug and assault offenses.

Avoiding his own apartment, Adams left his mother’s home on July 8, and three days later, the premonitions of his own death came true on a construction site thousands of miles away.

This is the bizarre story of the unsolved murder of Blair Adams.

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Chilling never-before-seen sketches by BTK serial killer showing girls bound and gagged with nooses around their necks are released by cops as they hunt for clues in case of missing girl

Chilling never-before-scene sketches by the BTK serial killer have shown girls gagged with nooses around their neck.

Cops released the images as they step up the investigation into a slew of unsolved murders which they suspect Dennis Rader may have been involved in.

Rader, known as the BTK killer, ‘Bind, Torture, Kill’ went on a murderous two decade killing spree during 1970s to the 1990s, including two children in Kansas. He pleaded guilty to ten murders and is currently serving ten consecutive life sentences.

The images released by the Osage County Sheriff’s Office this week were first recovered after Rader’s arrest in February 2005, but in January, an investigation was opened into other evidence that was discovered by Wichita Police, including, writings and sketches that officials believe may be a possible link to several unsolved cases in the area.

Though there were hundreds of sketches recovered, Osage County Sheriff Eddie Virden told CNN that a ‘few rare color images’ may depict more crimes committed by Rader.

The digital images obtained exclusively by the news outlet show eerie pictures of three different female victims gagged – some have a noose around their neck with their arms and legs bound. Each are wearing a short garment and have a terrifying expression on their faces. 

Investigators believe all three victims are being held captive in a barn.

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Florida diving team finds 32 cars submerged in a Doral lake on their mission to solve 40 missing persons cold cases

Divers in Florida have uncovered a total of 32 cars submerged in a lake that are expected to be linked to criminal cold cases.  

Ken Fleming and Doug Bishop said that they stumbled upon the vehicles, which were most likely dumped during criminal activities, in their bid to help solve missing person cases in Doral, near Miami International Airport. 

The volunteer divers are now working with Miami-Dade County to remove all the vehicles from the murky water near Northwest 87th Avenue and 13th Terrace – before they start to look into any potential cold cases connections. 

Videos captured underwater show the divers looking inside the abandoned vehicles during their excavations on Sunday.

Fleming told 7News: ‘When we discover a spot like this with multiple vehicles, it pretty much indicates that a crime where they’re disposing the vehicles and hiding them from law enforcement.’ 

The volunteers use sonar technology after doing their research on where clues on missing people cases might located. 

He added: ‘We have a giant database of our own that we extract.

‘We have 40 that we’re targeting right now of folks that disappeared, anywhere from two or three months ago to 30, 40 years ago.’

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Strange and Mysterious Vanishings at Mount Shasta


Looming over the landscape of Siskiyou County, California is the imposing and majestic figure of Mount Shasta. Towering alone over 14,000 feet above its surroundings, it is a solitary, formidable presence that has since time unremembered been seen as a hallowed place by Native Americans, who believe it to be the home of various gods and spirits, and feature it in many of their creation myths. The mountain has also long been saturated with tales of all manner of mysterious phenomena, including lost cities populated by refugees from a lost continent, Bigfoot, ghosts, lizard people, portals to other dimensions and vortices, and it has long been a UFO hotspot. Among the many mysteries this towering behemoth holds are the many people who have come here to never return, and the mountain seems to be in a sense a hungry place with a habit of making people vanish off the face of the earth. 

By far one of the most famous tales of a vanishing at Mount Shasta revolves around a retired mining engineer by the name of J.C. Brown in the 1930s. At the time, there was much talk among occultists and Theosophists that the mountain was the home of an ancient race of enlightened, white-robed spiritual beings called the Lemurians, who were said to have escaped their sinking continent of Lemuria millions of years ago to take refuge at first at Atlantis, and then when that sank too in a lost city within the bowels of Mount Shasta. It was a popular notion for various New Agers at the time, and although it was dismissed out of hand by the scientific community and general public, there were many accounts of people encountering these enigmatic entities and even visiting their hidden city. It was against this backdrop of strangeness that one day in 1934 Brown pushed the lost city and the Lemurians onto headlines and into the public consciousness. 

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‘Ripper Diary’ Confirmed to be Real?

A controversial memoir suspected of being the diary of Jack the Ripper has allegedly been confirmed to be real.

Discovered in 1992, the book was purportedly penned by a Liverpool cotton merchant named James Maybrick, who confessed in the diary to being Jack the Ripper.

Details surrounding how the book had been found were shrouded in secrecy, leading many to suspect that the diary was simply a clever forgery.

However a new book claims to have successfully traced the origins of the book back to Maybrick’s home and, thus, strengthens the case that he was, indeed, Jack the Ripper.

Researchers looking into the memoir determined that the Ripper suspect’s home was being renovated in 1992.

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Cops probe if case of naked man stuffed in barrel along Malibu beach is tied to 2020 murder of rapper Pop Smoke

Los Angeles authorities are investigating a potential connection between the 2020 murder of Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke and a naked body that was found stuffed in a barrel floating off a Malibu beach this past week.

Family members have identified the remains stuffed inside the barrel as those of singer-songwriter Javonnta Murphy, 32, who was the brother of Jaquan Murphy — one of five people arrested in the wake of Pop Smoke’s murder.

Jaquan had originally been charged in the attempted murder of the rapper, but was later cleared of any wrongdoing. He is, however, awaiting trial for an unrelated murder in Los Angeles County. 

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is now looking into the possibility that Javonnta was killed in retaliation for Pop’s murder, TMZ reported.

The star, whose real name was Bashar Barakah Jackson, 20, was killed in a suspected home invasion at a Hollywood Hills home he had rented by a group of masked men at around 4.30am in February 2020. 

That July, two men and two teenagers were charged with his killing. All four defendants were members of the same street gang and are said to have learned of Pop Smoke’s whereabouts from his Instagram account. 

They were able to see the address of the rapper’s Airbnb on a gift bag label and saw  that he had a stack of cash with him.

A friend of someone staying in the house had called 911 to report the intruders, according to police.

The rapper’s body was discovered shortly afterward, and he was subsequently declared dead after being taken to a hospital. 

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Missing millionaire crypto influencer found dismembered in suitcase

Police have launched a murder investigation after the dismembered remains of missing millionaire Fernando Pérez Algaba, 41, were discovered by a group of children in Argentina over the weekend.

The grisly case came to light after the kids found a red suitcase filled with body parts while playing by a stream in the town of Ingeniero Budge, Buenos Aires Province, on Sunday, Jam Press reported.

The children’s parents notified the Buenos Aires police, who inspected the package and reportedly found the victim’s legs and forearm inside, discovering another whole arm in the stream.

On Wednesday, authorities discovered the missing head and torso, El País reported.

The body parts were cleanly amputated, suggesting the work of a professional, local media reported.

Meanwhile, a subsequent autopsy revealed that the victim had been shot three times before the dismemberment.

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Former pastor charged with killing 8-year-old girl who was walking to Bible camp nearly 50 years ago

An 83-year-old former pastor has been charged with the kidnapping and murder of a neighboring pastor’s daughter in 1975, Pennsylvania officials announced Monday.

The suspect, David Zandstra, was arrested on July 17 in Cobb County, Georgia, where investigators say he confessed to killing 8-year-old Gretchen Harrington nearly five decades ago when he was a pastor in Marple Township, Pennsylvania, according to the Delaware County District Attorney’s office in Pennsylvania.

His confession came after investigators presented him with new evidence gathered early this year, which came from an interview with a confidential informant and a diary entry the informant wrote in 1975 when she was a 10-year-old girl, the district attorney’s office said in a news release.

Zandstra has been charged with criminal homicide, murder, kidnapping of a minor and the possession of an instrument of crime, the release said.

“Justice has been a long time coming, but we are proud and grateful to finally be able to give the community an answer,” Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said in a statement.

This case has “haunted” members of law enforcement and the small area of Marple Township since Gretchen went missing, Stollsteimer said. The girl was last seen walking to summer Bible camp on August 15th, 1975, the release said.

The camp was held at both the Trinity Church Chapel Christian Reform Church – where Zandstra was a pastor – and the Reformed Presbyterian Church – where Gretchen’s father was a pastor, the release said. Gretchen’s father became concerned when she failed to appear at his church, the release says, and it was Zandstra who then called police to report Gretchen’s disappearance.

Investigators noted there were inaccuracies in Zandstra’s early statements and they had questions about how the pastor knew so much about what Gretchen was wearing that day, even though she never arrived at camp, according to a newly released criminal complaint.

At the time, Zandstra denied knowing anything about the disappearance, the complaint said.

Two months later, Gretchen’s skeletal remains were found in nearby Ridley Creek State Park. Her cause of death was homicide, and the medical examiner said Gretchen suffered “two or more blunt impacts to the skull,” according to court documents.

Nearly five decades went by as the case laid dormant. Ultimately, an interview with a woman who was friends with the suspect’s daughter in the 1970s – and her diary entries from that time – led to a pivotal break in the case.

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