Most disturbing episode of “Unsolved Mysteries”

Personally or otherwise?

The original Allagash Abduction episode -1988 or '89- with its combination of the guy in hypnosis and terrifying illustrations scared the fuck of me.

The woman who claimed to have been stalked for years and then was found dead. They had recordings of the alleged stalker calls, and the voice may or may not have belonged to her.

Someone must remember ... I think she was Canadian?

This one always gets me for how close she was to being rescued.

Cindy James r2 though I don't recall an Unsolved episode about that. Will have to look it up.

This is an episode about it from my favourite true crime podcast.

That's it, r4. Thanks!

Cindy did it to herself. She was a sad wackjob. She had a history of lying and making up relationships that didn’t exist.

The infamous lesbian killer, aka Elaine Parent, aka the Chameleon Killer still gives people nightmares.

Skip to 27:30.

Angela Hammond’s fiance totally did it. She was seven blocks away in a small town and was calling him from a pay phone for 30 minutes. No way he’d have gotten away with it today.

As a child, the episode about Tina Resch and her psychokinetic abilities scared me the most. My gut was right as she is now serving a life sentence for murder.

Rainboy

I'm fairly certain Cindy James stalked herself, but I'm not convinced she killed herself.

The story is all kinds of weird.

Thanks r5, will be checking that out tonight!

R12 she died of a drug o/d. However the drugs she took didn't take effect right away, morphine and something else, so she had time to tie herself up. The knots were also recreated in 3 minutes, morphine takes 15 min to take effect.

She did it.

Cindy James was being harassed by her ex who happened to be a psychiatrist. He knew all the right buttons to push.

Angela Hammond 's boyfriend was ruled out pretty quickly. There were witnesses to his phone call with Angela.

This show scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.

Honestly, the scariest thing was the theme music.

Yeah me too r16. Even now when I hear the intro and Robert Stack's voice i get chills.

Season 1, episode 1. Great theme, Robert Stack in trench coat.

You're welcome.

Season 5, episode 12 titled "Texas Most Wanted", features Matthew McConaughey in his first credited acting role. It was also a bonkers story thay remained with me for some time.

They had the freakiest ghost stories.

It's not disturbing, but that poor son "Pistol Black" was so hot.

The one where a woman went missing and years later some anonymous calls from a payphone said something like "so-and-so is alive, and she lives in Omaha" and hung up. For some reason that one always gave me the creeps.

r23 the thought of living in Omaha would give me to creeps too

The Allagash Abduction episode scared the fuck out of me when it was featured on UM.

Another show that featured it was that now forgotten show Sightings which covered a lot of UFO and alien stories.

The Lady In Black creeped me the fuck out when I was a kid.

The Zip Gun Bomber story- booby trapped packages with bullets were sent to people and went people opened the bullets would be fired. One woman died as a result and five other people were injured.

R26 oh my when she started speaking in tongues blahblllahbmywahhbluwbbukah hee hee!

Angela Hammond was a case of mistaken identity. There were many witnesses to her abduction.

Whoa, r10!

They covered the cause of The Octopus Murders. Netflix has a great documentary about that.

Was I the only one who was terrified of this show as a kid? I still watched even though I knew it would give me nightmares. Even the theme song was frightening.

The girl that went missing from the Scarface movie. They still never found her.

R23 is referring to the Judith Hyams case. It's near 100% certain that she died during an illegal abortion. The mystery is who and why someone made the phone call. Judy disappeared from Coral Gables and had no connection to Omaha.

I never watched it. I thought it was hokey with Stack in his trench coat. But these are pretty interesting stories. The alien abductions sound like they’re carried out with the help of MK-Ultra.

There are so many. The Angela Hammond one always stuck with me; also Kristi Krebs.

The segment about the murder of Heather Uffelman by a man named "Tom Johnson" also really freaked me out for some reason. She and her boyfriend were two college students who were lured to a motel via a newspaper ad where they were going to sell an Apple computer. The strange man ended up forcing the two to wrap themselves in bedsheets before brutalizing them with a clawhammer. Her boyfriend survived it, but she died, and they never were able to identify the killer.

For sheer hard-as-nails disturbing, though, it's the episode of the elderly man whose body was found stuffed in a steamer trunk at a state park in West Virginia. I saw this episode on a stormy afternoon while I was home sick with the flu. I think I was in sixth grade at the time. UM rarely showed actual crime scene photos, but in an attempt to identify the man, they showed a close-up image of his face on the morgue table, prefaced by a warning that the image "may disturb some viewers." I remember there being blood around his mouth and the expression on his face was horrifying. I immediately threw a blanket over my face until I could safely discern the image was off the screen, but it scarred me for fucking life. They did eventually identify him, and the story was very sad. He was killed by his female caretaker who stole all his money.

The Dennis Depue story that inspired the opening scene of the original Jeepers Creepers. Even if he weren’t a killer that guy is terrifying looking. First story at link

The episode on spontaneous human combustion was probably the worst thing you could've shown me as a kid with a still-undiagnosed anxiety disorder. I grew up thinking I could start smoking and combust at any moment.

The haunted castle in NJ was a good one.

Patricia Meehan case scared me as a kid just for how creepy I found the reenactment of her stood behind the fence watching the crash, and that last picture of her. That said looking back the actual case seems to have been over sensationalised given she was a lone women likely with brain damage walking round the Montana countryside in the dark I doubt she lived long enough to be an amnesiac hobo.

Here's the episode of Unsolved Mysteries with future Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey. He's kind of hammy but damn he was pretty

Starts about 36:30 if it doesn't cue. McBongo doesn't appear right away so don't give up

Matthew Chase. He was a twink in L.A. who vanished after going to an ATM one night. The ATM surveillance footage showed him depositing his check, then returning 30 minutes later, attempting to make a withdrawal. In a chilling moment, a man appears right directly behind him. A few months later, his body was found in a ravine. He had died from a gunshot wound.

Mary Morris and Mary Morris. Two women in Houston named Mary Morris, no relation, who were murdered in their cars three days apart.

I'm in Houston R43 and that one freaked everyone out when it happened. Despite the authorities saying no connection, everyone thinks it was related.

[quote]Mary Morris and Mary Morris. Two women in Houston named Mary Morris, no relation, who were murdered in their cars three days apart.

Sounds like Julie Teeger.

The daughter of Natalie on Monk, R45?

Yes, r46.

The Chinese ghost named Teresita Basa who solved her own murder

In the episode the ghost says MY NAME IS TERESITA BASAAAA in a loud whisper. I would mimic it as a kid until my mom told Teresita (me) to STFU

Teresita at 30:25 un the video below

Robert Stack was the perfect host of this show, his tone of voice and vocal inflections really added to the creepy factor.

Agreed, r49. Dennis Farina was a strange and disappointing choice to replace him

Man, Dennis Farina hosted UM? Must have been long after I watched. Didn't the producers stand up big fat Raymond Burr for some UM episodes too?

That theme music reminds me of the music from Halloween.

Never 'go with' someone- even if they have a gun to your side. So many of these victims are led away from someplace never to return.

Lay down and make them drag you. They're going to kill you anyway.

The Danny Casolaro/Octopus Conspiracy is quite the rabbit hole

This story (Diana Robertson and Mike Reimer) is a lesser-known one that always creeped me out.

Also, there was a segment on the show in its second-ever episode, before it became regularly syndicated. Karl Malden hosted the segment. It was about a woman named Wanda Jean Mays who vanished from her parents' home in Alabama. She had smashed her way through a bedroom window and her bloodied nightgown was found on the dock of the lake on her family's property. It was a bizarre story, and they believed she was having a psychotic episode. They later found her bones in 2008 at the foot of a cliff. I believe her death was ruled an accident. The segment itself was extremely creepy.

The Jenny Pratt case. She was 16 and dating a drug dealer. She was riding on a motorcycle with her boyfriend when a truck drove by and someone riding in the truck bed hit her in the back of the head with a 2x4. The boyfriend Curtis Croft knows who did it but will never say who. He was something of an internet celebrity years back for his video blogs and his brain was totally fried.

Jenny Pratt survived but was left with permanent brain damage.

R10 I cannot find that episode anywhere. I wonder if it was pulled at the request of law enforcement.

Wadada the creepy rapist who beat his victim with a hammer. How is it they were never able to find him? He had a deformed right hand, a withered arm, and burn scars.

Blair Adams murder after panicked traveling from Vancouver to Seattle to Washington D.C. to Knoxville where he was found naked and dead in a parking lot

I think he had a psychotic break but there are so many strange facts about the case that a lot more more might have been going on. Couldn't find the Unsolved Mysteries segment but the case has been covered extensively on youtube channels and podcasts

A few years ago it was revealed that Blair had been sexually assaulted. The police had held that detail back.

Eric Robert Rudolph as a per in that case?

I’m pretty sure this was an episode of Unsolved Mysteries:

It was about a doctor who accumulated a history of possibly poisoning patients to death. He seem to go from hospital to hospital over time. If I remember right, mysterious deaths would pile up around him and eventually he would quit or get fired from a place.

There was one moment where someone he was caring for died, and the wife was really distraught and he said something bizarre to her like, “I hope it’s nothing that I did.” And sort of laughed. And the woman told police.

There was another moment where he brought doughnuts to the restaurant of the staff at one place he worked and when everyone ate them they all got violently ill.

The whole episode creeped me out.

*brought doughnuts to the rest of the staff

r62 I think you're talking about Dr. Michael Swango. The sick fuck is now serving three consecutive life sentences.

Robert Stack had such presence. I found him so sinister and mysterious, years before I knew he had been a movie star.

R58 Wadada probably founds ways to get out of the US.

I was also very freaked out by Rain Man

R62 was it Christian Longo?

r68 see r64

[quote] Robert Stack was the perfect host of this show, his tone of voice and vocal inflections really added to the creepy factor.

Stack was also great when narrating some of those lost loved one segments because he knew how to narrate in a warm/kind manner.

The haunting of the Queen Mary.

Mary! What a queen!

I didn't watch the old school version with Robert Stack -- after I became a fan of true crime, I began watching the recent Netflix episodes.

The episode that freaked me out is the one about Rey Rivera, whose body was found in a hotel storage room after apparently jumping off the roof of a nearby building. His body busted a hole in the storage room ceiling and laid there for a number a days before being discovered. Many believe it was not suicide but a homicide due to the distance between the roof and the building he ended up in, his flip-flops still on the roof, some cryptic messages his girlfriend found in his PC. I found all of it very creepy.

The story that comes in a close second is Elisa Lam. Watching the video of her bizarre behavior in the hotel is eerie and don't get me started on who she ended up in the water tank.

The one armed Jamaican stabbed/rapist. His other arm was shriveled. They stopped including it in reruns because people kept thinking the actor was the real criminal. They also never caught him

Lenny Dirickson's disappearance always creeped me out for some reason.

Also, the murder of Phillip Innes, a medical student who was brutally killed by a mysterious hitchhiker in British Columbia while en route to Washington state from Alaska. The hitchhiker was seen by multiple people, including a mother and daughter who operated a diner in the literal middle of nowhere, as well as by an older couple who actually let the guy spend the night in their house, unaware he had just murdered someone and was on the run. They never figured out who he was.

The case of truck driver Devin Williams who seemingly had a psychotic episode (possibly drug induced?) on the road. He was seen by several people in a national forest in Arizona driving his rig through rough terrain and acting extremely bizarrely. In the segment, there was a recreation of a young couple who saw him standing in the woods talking to himself, miming the act of making a fire with a rock and a $20 bill. They were concerned and asked him if he was alright, and he said something like "I've gotta light the grill". I don't know why, but the recreation really creeped me out when I first saw it as a kid.

Also—and I don't know how you bitches have slipped up this far into the thread—but NO ONE has mentioned the 1991 Blind River Rest Stop murders in Ontario. That story is horrifying, and the computer-generated image of the suspect looked extremely realistic, especially for the time it was produced. It looks like an actual mugshot. It gives me the fucking creeps. Also, a fun fact: It happened on my first birthday.

R41 the Patricia Meehan case is very strange. There were a LOT of alleged sightings of her in the aftermath of her disappearance (as in 5,000+—it's pretty well-documented on the Wikipedia page about her case), but I always take these with a grain of salt. My mom is from Montana (Billings, to be exact), but I've been all over that state and the area Patricia disappeared from is very, VERY rural. I have cousins who live near Glasgow, MT, about an hour and a half northwest of Circle. Once you get far enough out of town, there are stretches of road where you can drive for hours and hardly see any other cars. It is very desolate.

I am almost certain she wandered off, died either by accident or due to the elements, and was eaten by wild animals. Still, it's more the circumstances that led up to the road incident and her just walking off into the darkness that give off a very sinister vibe. She lived in Bozeman, which is on the opposite side of the state, so I'm not sure why she was so far away in the first place. She was from Pittsburgh originally and had told her parents she wanted to come home, so I think it was assumed she was driving east toward Pennsylvania.

Not disturbing but the one that a hetero couple was watching and the guy was the criminal being sought. He ran out of the house but she made the call and turned him in. I still find that to be hilarious.

Kind of disturbing, but the one with the missing little Navajo girl, Antonette Cayedito. She went missing in 1986 from her home in Gallup, NM. I follow up on it from time to time, but still missing and no leads. It's very strange and an interesting rabbit hole to go through.

Also Kristi Krebbs and Tara Calico. 2 missing young women still unsolved.

R76. Thank you as that’s the case I was going to post about but couldn’t think of her name.

I have find the Cindy James episode; sounds intriguing.

R75 I've written down all the episodes you mentioned. Never saw any of them but now I can't wait to watch them. Thanks.

R80 it's free on YouTube, first segment of this episode (most all of the old UM episodes are available to stream for free on many platforms). There is also an extensive Wikipedia article on James's case that has a plethora of intricate details, mostly cited to two books that were written about her death, "Who Killed Cindy James?" and "The Deaths of Cindy James". I actually own both of those books, but they are long out of print and extremely expensive. I wish they'd get reprinted honestly.

The segment about this haunted house in Reno, Nevada traumatized me as a kid

The real unsolved mystery is how such a wooden stiff like Robert Stack was cast in the camp classic "Written on the Wind."

Comments like r84 keep me on the DL

The Cindy James case is terrifying

[quote] Man, Dennis Farina hosted UM? Must have been long after I watched. Didn't the producers stand up big fat Raymond Burr for some UM episodes too?

Farina hosted a repackaged version of the show from 2008-2010 on SpikeTV which later became the Paramount Network. They used cases from the Stack episodes, but edited them to make them shorter and they gave updates on some cases. Fans of the Stack years hated the format.

Farina wasn't horrible narrator or host, but he just didn't vibe well with true crime narration. In the early 2000s, I got into watching A&E true crime shows like American Justice and City Confidential. Bill Kurtis was the narrator of American Justice and Paul Winfield was the narrator of City Confidential. Both were terrific narrators. Episodes of those show are on some of the free streaming services like Tubi, PlutoTv etc. I work from home and will sometimes watch those shows along with UM.

^^Get back to work you lazy shit, or you're fired!

R41, someone upload the segment to TikTok. I can’t believe they never found her. She either snapped, hit her head in the accident, or was loaded.

R87 Farina wasn't a bad host per se, but for me it was the repackaging of segments that really made it unwatchable. A lot of these segments were filmed in the '80s and had a hazy, almost dreamlike look to them which added to the ambiance and paired with Stack's narration and the moody locations Stack appeared in. The updated Farina version had an obnoxious score and a cyber-like set which was so at odds with the tone of the segments. Recutting/truncating them with Farina's narration was just lazy and pointless. There was really no purpose to it. They should've just continued re-airing the original Stack episodes.

I liked the one where Robert Stack wore a trenchcoat and looked at the camera and said "WHY??" with a pained expression.

R87 If you’re a fan of Bill Kurtis, Roku’s Live TV section has a channel dedicated exclusively to his Cold Case Files series.

Y’all should out Sitcoms Online—that forum has a lot more information about cases.

Dennis Depue’s mugshot still scares the shit out of me. Episodes that still keep me up at night are the blind river rest stop killer and the connecticut river serial killer.

The Circleville Writer case wasn't extremely disturbing. But, still creepy.

Circleville, OH is chockful of Trump-lovin' buckabillies. Prostitutes are always disappearing there.

I guess you could call me an Unsolved Mysteries superfan. There was a period in my life, that lasted for about two years, where I was severely and clinically depressed. All I did was lay in bed and watch Unsolved Mysteries.

I must've watched every single season and every single episode atleast a dozen times. Once I grew tired of the repetition, it became background noise. Strangely, the only thing that seemed to alleviate my symptoms and give me comfort was Robert Stack's voice.

Anyway, r75, you may be surprised to learn that a datalounger once dated Lenny Dirickson's younger brother. They commented on a post here regarding Lenny's disappearance. Apparently, both Lenny and his brother were involved in transporting meth.

In a lot if these cases, I think important details were intentionally left out. That, or investigators chose not to give the production team information on every single suspect and/or circumstance. In a lot of cold cases, you hear later about information that investigators chose to hold back.

R96 has the ghost of Teresita Basa ever appeared to or communicated through you?

The Harden House story in Florida always creeped me out. A man who lived there was shot to death in the driveway and his murder was never solved. Years later, a woman kept having recurring dreams where she was inside a house she’d never been to before. Flash forward, she unwittingly took a tour of the home which was the very one she’d dreamt about for months—she realized she knew the entire layout of the house because of the dreams. She and her family ended up moving in, but it soon became clear to them that the house was haunted. It was a very weird story, especially her having the recurring dream of the home. I believed her story.

This one is hilarious. This woman worked in upscale department stores all across the county and robbed them when they weren’t looking. Her co-workers go on and on about how fat she was, how she looked like a school bus driver or a kindergarten teacher. lol. “She’s 300 pounds! You can’t miss her!”

r99 that seems custom-made for the DL

OMG R99 I loved watching that episode so much. Thank you! Oh, the characters…

I was looking for a way to kill part of my Wednesday evening. Thank you r99

On the disturbing end of inspirational, the story of the West End Baptist church where the furnace exploded and the church was destroyed. There was a choir rehearsal scheduled at the time but all the members were running late for various reasons and all escaped death. No Final Destination style deaths followed (that we know of.)

Story begins at 13:55

r99 thank you so much for posting that. DLers could've written that segment.

"There would be days when if I got someone in the door who wasn't on drugs I was delighted."

"You can’t go missing in a city when you are ENORMOUS!”

r99 was even better than I expected!!

If you’re wondering whatever happened to the overweight embezzler in R99 (Bonnie Wilder), Unsolved Mysteries Wiki has all the info…

Marie Hilley who poisoned her whole family at various times in attempts to get life insurance payouts. She killed her husband and nearly her teenage daughter. It's so odd that a seemingly normal housewife and mother would suddenly become money obsessed to the point she would kill her family. After the police became suspicious she left town and adopted an alias and lured in a new husband in a confusing convoluted scam. DL fave Judith Light played her in a TV movie but the actress from the Unsolved Mysteries segment was so memorable I had a hard time watching Light in the role.

The Hilley segment starts at 12:20

[quote]Here's the episode of Unsolved Mysteries with future Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey. He's kind of hammy but damn he was pretty

He certainly was R42. I watched one of the later Stack versions of the show in the late 90s. When they ran the Larry episode, I did a double take when the gorgeous guy mowing the lawn came on.

The I-70 killer case was very disturbing. They've never identified him either. That one gives me the creeps.

I love the part where Marie Hilley pretends to be her twin sister

R110 me too, it's very DL-coded

Season 14; Episode 26: Frederick Valentich plane disappearance and possible UFO involvement. The segment with its choppy radio communications and repetitious dialogue is quite effective.

The Sharon Kinne segment was interesting - turns out she was living in Canada under an assumed name when the episode aired!

The Tom Dixon case really spooks me. He is believed to have murdered a man named Gary Simmons in Independence, Missouri. The crime itself is not particularly scary per se, but it's the way that Simmons's body was found that is creepy. There was a bus driver who regularly parked his bus in a lot that was up against a rocky outcropping—the driver, Tyrone Rollins, said he often got a eerie feeling from the place, and felt as if he was being watched by someone. After experiencing this for several years, he one day finally went and explored the rocky terrain next to the bus lot. He soon discovered a cave, and upon looking inside, found the skeletal remains of Simmons, who had been dead at that point for 15 or so years. Could be a coincidence, but I find it very strange.

[quote] I love the part where Marie Hilley pretends to be her twin sister

It's a hoot but what the hell was she up to? She was tempting fate faking one identity; why try and pull off a twin sister routine? The show didn't explain that part

This one scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. There was a couple sleeping overnight in a camper in Canada and some guy in a blonde wig shot them.

R116 that's the one mentioned at R75, also known as the "Blind River Rest Stop killings". The guy shot the elderly couple in the RV; the wife died but the husband survived. The maniac then proceeded to shoot a random guy in his car before taking off. Scary as fuck.

There's so much more, r107.

Dexter Stefonek was murdered at a rest stop in Montana. The words "Hot Jock" were written in the men's room and police thought it was a clue. Possibly Dexter tried to hook up with the wrong guy.

^ We also got to hear Robert Stack say "Hot Jock"😆

Wow, lots of creepy shit was going on in Montana in the late '80s/early '90s. There was also the murder of Father John Kerrigan in Kalispell, which paralleled the murder of Reynaldo Rivera in New Mexico two years earlier.

"There was a couple sleeping overnight in a camper in Canada and..."

I will never understand camping or hiking in remote areas. We invented civilization for a reason: so we'd be less likely to be mailed by bears or wolves or psychos. When you go out in a canper or tent you lose all that. Easy prey.

Here is the episode referenced at r58

My drag name is now Teresita Basa

[quote]A few years ago it was revealed that Blair had been sexually assaulted. The police had held that detail back.

Greedy bitch!

It should have been me...it was supposed to be ME!

I just want you all to know I’m thoroughly enjoying this thread. There were some stories I’ve never heard of us as they’ve been cut from versions of Unsolved Mysteries that are now on streaming platforms.

It must be hard for bears and wolves to lick and,place the stamps correctly.

Here is a podcast on Teresita Basa

Why was amnesia such a big thing back in the late 80s early 90s? There's a suspected case of it seemingly every other episode.

r129 I suspect because it was the height of the "repressed memories" therapeutic hysteria.

I just looked at the availability of the old DVD boxed sets. They go for around $400-$1,000 now.

Only $1,499.99!

The Ultimate Collection is the best DVD set if you want to see the actual episodes of the show. But yeah, it’s hard to find now and very pricy.

There were other DVD sets that cut up the shows into “themes” and eliminated a lot of the individual episodes’ content.

DVDs? Those are still around?

R129, people used to blame "amnesia" when someone went missing - "Bob disappeared! Maybe he's wandering around with amnesia and doesn't know how to get back to his family!" - because they didn't want to admit that someone willingly walked away from his/her family or might be deceased

Nowadays, we know that kind of amnesia is super rare

Didn't amnesia become a 'fugue state?'

There was a woman on Sitcoms Online who made bootleg DVD sets years ago before she was sent a cease and desist order. I used to read the forums over there about cases covered on UM. The posters there did a pretty good job about posting updates on cases. Most of the posters had good theories on many of the cases and they never became loons like the people on Web Sleuths.

The now defunct IMDB boards on Unsolved Mysteries were also pretty fun to read.

You don’t really need any of these on DVD given that FilmRise acquired them and has virtually the entire series available to stream for free. There are some outlier episodes that haven’t been put back into circulation—mainly the earlier specials that had other hosts such as Karl Malden—but the whole series is streaming for the most part.

R109, but there’s an extremely strong theory.

Here’s “more”, R109

Jesus, that I-70 story is awful...

R141 I was Googling the I-70 killer case and there is someone on Reddit who says they believe their biological father could be the killer. In the post from 2 years ago, they claim they were an infant when the murders occurred, that they lived in the general region, that he fit the suspect's profile and description, as well as noting that he often worked out of town. The Reddit user included a high school yearbook photo of their dad in the post, and there is a definite resemblance.

This guy shot his disabled son and his girlfriend at dinner 18 times. He stabbed her twice and put them in a trunk of a car. They never found him. It happened back in 1987. Reddit thinks they’ve found him, a John Doe. Here’s the episode.

@21:00

Here’s the Reddit post.

There’s another case of a woman whose car sped by her son and his girlfriend on the road. Her car was found on fire across some train tracks. For decades they swore it was a freak accident. A police officer didn’t buy it. Decades later they proved that it was done by her ex-husband. They went to arrest him and he shot himself. Crazy story.

@ 12:20

The story about the little girl abducted at her house and her mother hearing a 911 call of her telling the police she’s alive and someone in the background screams at her for using the phone and she screams it’s horrifying. They now believe that her mother sold her.

There’s another one about a mother who claimed that her kid was stolen from her front porch. She later said that she killed her and threw her into the river. She recanted. Her father was rich. There were weird sightings of the girl. Years later the woman took her son blindfolded to a cemetery and began stabbing him.

The Rachael Runyan case always disturbed me. It was one of those signature UM episodes from the Satanic Panic era, but it was horrifying no less. She was abducted from a playground in Utah and later found dead on the side of a road. The UM segment suggested that she could have been abducted and used in a snuff film. There was probably no legitimate evidence for this, but the mere thought was absolutely vile.

The Jenny Pratt case was disturbing and sad. Jenny was 17 year old girl who was riding a motorcycle with her boyfriend. They were stopped an intersection and someone riding in the bed of a truck struck her with a 2x4. Jenny's boyfriend Curtis Croft was alleged to be involved in drug dealing and many believe the attacker want to hit him and not Jenny. Jenny was left with permanent brain damage. Years later, Curtis was arrested drug charges regarding marijuana plants.

The Springfield Three: On June 6, 1992, best friends Stacy McCall and Suzanne Streeter graduated from Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri. They arrived at the home of Stacy's mother, Sherill Levitt, around 2am the next morning and were never seen again. When authorities arrived there, nothing appeared to be disturbed other than the porch light being smashed. That same day, a witness saw a man telling a woman matching Suzanne's description to "not do anything stupid". An unidentified transient was seen near the house shortly before the disappearances, but authorities don't know whether or not it was connected to this case.

The Springfield Three is baffling.

I love this one. This guy totally murdered his wife, put her in the shed which he wouldn’t allow her family to look in. His family came over and washed down the entire house. They interview is old WASP mother and her reaction to the thought that they covered up the crime is hilarious. She’s clutching for imaginary pearls. “How awful that they think that. We would never.” lol No one was ever arrested for the crime but he’s still the number one suspect.

@ 19:13

Anyone remember this elderly couple? The wife was attacked non-stop in their house. Hit over the head. The family had a stake out and somehow he would knock on the door and runaway before being seen. I swear the husband was doing it. The person would steal things and then return them. The woman’s name was Dorothy Wacker. lol

@ 30:35

The Circleville Letters. The show even received a letter. A I know what you did. The guy put a sign on the side of the road about a school bus driver. She got off the bus to take it down and there was a rigged up shotgun behind it.

Where is Jodi Husentriuit, the news anchor kidnapped from outside her apartment building never found again. It’s the 30th anniversary this year.

There was DL poster years ago who used to pop into Springfield Three threads and claimed that his stepfather knew Stacey McCall's parents and the poster claimed that Stacey and Suzie weren't close friends.

Yesterday was the 33rd anniversary of the disappearance.

The Springfield Three is my #1 missing persons case, as the above poster said it is so baffling. Also, creepy and very sad. I don't think it's ever going to be solved, and it's likely that whoever the culprit was is dead by now, it's been so many years.

The Springfield Three has haunted my dreams for years now. That being said—and not to be this person, but I'm going to be—that case was (surprisingly) never profiled on Unsolved Mysteries.

R155 My theory is Jodi was killed by her older male friend John Vansice. Vansice was obsessed with her and named his boat after her.

R158 Yeah, Springfield Three was never featured on UM. I first learned of the case through the ID show Disappeared.

Susie Streeter and Stacy McCall had been close friends but drifted apart in high school. They just happened to end up together on graduation night. Their mutual friend was Janelle Kirby, the girl who first discovered they were missing.

I've always wondered if it was somebody from the graduation party who followed them back to the house.

The Springfield three is a truly baffling case. I’ve read a lot about it and cannot come up with any answer that totally makes sense. My natural inclination would be that they were the victims of a random intruder, but if I remember correctly, there were no signs of forced entry aside from the porch light being shattered. I have always wondered if someone gained access to the house through an unlocked door perhaps.

Didn’t the Springfield Three leave all personal possessions behind too?

I've posted this theory here before. A book was lying open on Sheryl's bed and the blinds in Susie's room were pushed apart. Maybe they heard the sound of glass shattering. Somebody opened the door to look out and the perp pushed his way inside.

I don't think it was a random crime of opportunity, I think it was premeditated and had been planned for a while. I have absolutely no idea who could've done it or the reason why. It's such a mystery.

[quote] Didn’t the Springfield Three leave all personal possessions behind too?

Yes. All of the women's purses were left behind. Sherill had $800 in cash in her purse.

Slightly off-topic, but does anyone know why all of the earlier seasons of Disappeared (seasons 4 and older) are unavailable to stream/purchase anywhere? I'd like to go back and watch some of them. They were very creepy, especially the earlier seasons.

R156, Stacy’s mom said that they had drifted apart after middle school but sort of found their way back to each other towards the end.

R168, no idea. I’d say maybe it’s a contact thing but it’s their own show. Disappeared remains the best show ID ever produced. The makers should have been hired for the Unsolved Mysteries Netflix reboot along with its gay narrator.

The Springfield Three looked like they got raptured. The house is up online with photos when it was up for sale. Can you imagine living at that place? The lightbulb next to the door was found shattered. The serial killer in jail who alluded to being involved but wouldn’t speak until after his mother died, his family lived in the area and he would have been there at the time. The question remains, how did they get them out of the house? The son has been arrested countless times. He’s a huge mess. His sister was living with him and had to leave. His mother threw him out as well. Of course he was a suspect. The one girl was dating a guy who was grave robbing and she was set to testify.

There is a person on Reddit who swears that he saw them that night in a van. They stopped at a food mart and stayed in the van in their shirts and underwear. It’s a very involved story but they seem to really know the area. It’s really creepy. He said that the one girl was nursing her foot. She might have stepped on glass.

The thing about them being buried underneath a parking lot came from a physic and the parking lot didn’t exist at the time of their disappearance.

R163, the blinds were messed up like someone had been looking out the window.

R171 yeah, here's the house. It's an objectively cute, quaint home, but I would be very creeped out living there. There is a backdoor that goes into the yard, as well as French doors that I'm assuming come off a bedroom, though I'm not sure if the French doors were there in 1992—could've been added later. The backdoor going onto the patio is original I'm assuming, so that could have been a point of entry if there was an intruder. The smashed porchlight at the front door makes it seem like something bad happened at the front entrance of the house, though.

UM covered a case about a young girl who swore that she wouldn’t live to be 16. She lived to see her 16th birthday and couldn’t believe it. Her family knew all about her fears. She went out and was murdered. She left a letter to her family in the event of her death before she was 16 to not mourn her. I think they caught the killer. Totally random. It was such a sad story.

R175, a friend said that the mother had been painting furniture and had the windows and everything open earlier that day.

The French doors were in Susie's room.

[quote] [R168], no idea. I’d say maybe it’s a contact thing but it’s their own show. Disappeared remains the best show ID ever produced. The makers should have been hired for the Unsolved Mysteries Netflix reboot along with its gay narrator

I'm not R168. But, I also think it's a contract thing or smething.

I agree, Disappeared is/was one of the better produced shows on ID.

[quote]I don't think it was a random crime of opportunity, I think it was premeditated and had been planned for a while. I have absolutely no idea who could've done it or the reason why. It's such a mystery.

My theory is that Suzie was the target. For about a year before the disappearance, she had been hanging out with a rough crowd/criminals. I think she saw or knew something (possibly drug-related), and whenever someone in that group learned she was talking with the cops and was going to testify about her ex-boyfriend and his best friend, they got worried.

I doubt teens could have pulled this off, but who knows? Anyhow, I would look at older people or acquaintances in Suze's circle.

I hope the case is resolved before Stacy McCall's mom dies, but time is running out.

r180 that's a plausible theory, Suzie's ex-boyfriend ran around with some real lowlifes and perhaps they thought she knew about illegal activities that they were involved in.

Suzie wasn't supposed to be home that night. They would have had to know she changed her plans at the last minute. First she was going to stay at a motel in Branson with friends but that didn't work out. She and Stacy were going to stay at Janelle's house but there were relatives visiting so nowhere to sleep. They decided around 2AM to go to Suzie's house.

r182 that's another bizarre thing about such a bizarre case. Suzie and Stacy's plans changed at the last minute and in the middle of the night, they were never supposed to be at Suzie's house. And it was a Saturday night with high school graduation celebrations going on all over town, meaning tons of traffic all night long. Why do an abduction that night, and not on a weeknight when there was nothing going on so the risk of being seen would be much lower.

It's all so strange.

The theme song still gives me chills.

Kurt Sova's case is very eerie to me

[quote] Suzie wasn't supposed to be home that night. They would have had to know she changed her plans at the last minute.

Exactly. If there was a target it would be the mother as she was going to be home, not the two young women.

I’m not sure I understand, r183. People saw them at a convenience store later that night and there are reports that the mother went out looking for them too. They obviously didn’t have anything to worry about in terms of being seen because they weren’t or the reports of seeing one of them being forced to drive the van is true.

I wonder if the store about them being fed to pigs on a farm were true. They found bones but said that it didn’t belong to the women. I wonder if they should take another look at the bones. They might have concluded it wasn’t them based on visual evidence and not DNA.

Please forgive me straying from topic, but I have tried without success to find anything of a story that was on Unsolved Mysteries or perhaps some similar format program. If anyone recalls this, I would be happy for more info...

A decent looking white man in his late 20s or 30s walks into a bar, meets a friend, goes to take a piss, and is never seen again... Only the man IS NOT Brian Shaffer and it's not Ohio, but rather some Southern or Southern adjacent state.

I think he met the friend, they played a game of pool in a nearly empty bar in a rural location, he went to the toilet and was never seen again. His truck still in the parking lot. There was one report of having seen the man in his pickup truck possibly in some disagreement that same day or the day before? There was no indication that it was a self-planned disappearance. There was nothing discovered to suggest a mental health issue, financial trouble, relationship problems...the usual things. Psychics were eventually called in and suggested the vague readings that psychics do.

It stood out in my mind because none of the usual things seemed likely: either it was s very elaborately planned exit, or something very strange.

Anyone remember as anything if this?

Brian Schaffer had too many calls. Nobody ever got the real story of what he was up to.

Brian Shaffer is another truly baffling disappearance.

Susan Walsh, a stripper and freelance journalist who vanished under very weird circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey

Cynthia Anderson's disappearance in Ohio. She was a 20-year-old legal secretary who had experienced nightmares about being abducted. She went to work one day at the law office, where she usually spent the mornings working alone. The two attorneys who were the partners of the firm, Jim Rabbitt and Jay Feldstein, arrived at the office midday following a meeting, and Cynthia was nowhere to be found. On her desk was a novel that was left open on a page which detailed the violent abduction of a woman at knifepoint. Her car was parked in the parking lot and the office was undisturbed, but her wallet and keys were missing. They never did find her. All of the extraneous details are really sinister IMO

I want to know is why that guy with the trimmed pubes and the goggles in his bomber jacket jumped the fence, sprinted down the runway, and hopped onto the wing of the small plane.

The Tallman haunting in Horicon, Wisconsin. It hits all the right UM notes for me. Hazy, surreal re-enactments with a strong late '80s flair, creepy imagery throughout, and a truly bizarre story. On paper, it sounds ridiculous: A fucking haunted bunk bed(?!)—but the segment is just downright eerie. It scared the shit out of me as a kid, and still today it remains effective. I don't even care if the whole story is hogwash. Truly nightmarish.

[quote] I want to know is why that guy with the trimmed pubes and the goggles in his bomber jacket jumped the fence, sprinted down the runway, and hopped onto the wing of the small plane.

They showed his pubes?

Some of the segments from UM were removed from the updated Stack versions from 2017 because the statute of limitations had run out or the family asked them to.

The teenager in Omaha. I'd have to say the only logical idea is someone in the family did it and they got each other to cover it up.

R195, they didn’t show them. The ME mentioned that he was in great shape and had shaved or trimmed pubes (which was rare at the time) — that made them suspect that he had been a Chippendale dancer or a swimmer.

In the update they had figured out his name, but offered no other details — truly weird case.