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.