Mysteries and Histories

In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming noticed something strange in a contaminated Petri dish at his London laboratory: bacteria would not grow around a patch of mould. The substance responsible, which he named penicillin, would transform medicine, but discovering it was only the beginning. More than a decade later, Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and their Oxford colleagues, including Norman H...

On March 13, 1973, University of Iowa student Sarah Ann Ottens was found dead in her dorm room at Rienow Hall. Much of the campus had emptied for spring break, but Sarah had stayed behind. She had been brutally beaten and strangled. Fellow student James Wendell Hall was convicted of her murder in 1974 and sentenced to 50 years in prison. But in 1983, his conviction was overturned after evidence em...

On June 8, 1924, British climbers George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappeared into the clouds high on Mount Everest while attempting to become the first people to reach its summit. Neither returned, leaving a question that has haunted mountaineering for a century: did they reach the top before they died? Mallory’s body was discovered in 1999, but it did not settle the mystery. Then, in Se...

Why would someone confess to a crime they never committed? Real cases reveal how hours of questioning, exhaustion, intimidation, and false claims about evidence can push innocent people to say what investigators want to hear, sometimes believing that confessing is their only way to go home. Children and people with intellectual disabilities are particularly vulnerable, but adults can also be press...

In January 1968, 18-year-old Iowa State freshman Sheila Jean Collins was trying to get home to Evanston, Illinois, for the weekend. When her boyfriend could not drive her, she accepted a ride from someone who had found her name on the university’s ride board, without ever learning the driver’s name. Sheila was last seen waiting with her suitcase in Ames on January 26. Two days later, her body was...

In February 2009, 44-year-old Lesley Herring vanished from her Los Angeles home, leaving behind her car, phone, keys, purse, jewellery, and savings. Her husband, Lyle, claimed she had simply left but a Starbucks receipt found in her purse appeared to show she had bought coffee days after she disappeared. It was meant to be proof she was alive. Instead, investigators checked the café’s CCTV and fou...

On Christmas Eve 2010, Lori Erica Ruff died by suicide outside her in-laws’ home in Texas. Afterward, her family found a box of documents revealing that “Lori” had built her life on the identity of a child who had died years earlier. Even her husband had not known her real name. Investigators traced the paperwork back to 1988, when she obtained identification as Becky Sue Turner, then legally chan...

In October 1976, a farmer harvesting corn near Otterbein, Indiana, found a small cardboard box about 15 yards from the road. Inside was the body of an older woman who had been shot in the back of the head. For almost 50 years, she was known only as the “Box Lady of Benton County.” In 2026, genetic genealogy finally identified her as Jane Hart, a 69-year-old woman who had been living in Chicago aro...

In 2002, a quiet Ohio man named Joseph Newton Chandler III died by suicide in his Eastlake apartment. He left behind $82,000, but no family, no clear past, and a name that turned out to belong to an eight-year-old boy killed in a Texas car crash in 1945. For years, authorities had no idea who the adult “Chandler” really was. He had acquired the dead child’s identity in 1978 and lived under it for...

In October 2006, a man harvesting dogwood plants found a young woman’s remains in a marshy field near the Darlington Nuclear Plant in Bowmanville, Ontario. Investigators estimated she was 18 to 25 years old and that she may have died years before she was discovered. She was found with a ring marked “Burns,” but no identification. Police believe she was likely murdered; modern DNA analysis indicate...

In 1887, reporter Nellie Bly faked mental illness to be committed to New York City’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. For ten days, she witnessed cold baths, rotten food, beatings, neglect, and women held there despite showing no sign of mental illness. Her exposé, Ten Days in a Mad-House , shocked the public and helped secure increased funding and reforms for the institution. More br...

On the morning of February 10, 1990, two armed men walked into Las Cruces Bowl in New Mexico, forced seven people into an office, stole less than $5,000 from the safe, and shot every victim before setting the room on fire. Steven Teran, 26; his two-year-old daughter, Valerie; six-year-old Paula Holguin; and 13-year-old Amy Houser were killed in the attack. Three others survived: bowling-alley mana...

In 1796, English doctor Edward Jenner noticed a local belief that milkmaids who caught cowpox, a usually mild disease, seemed protected from smallpox, one of history’s deadliest infections. He tested the idea by taking material from a cowpox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes’s hand and inoculating eight-year-old James Phipps. James became mildly ill, recovered, and later did not develop smallpox when...

In December 1996, 12-year-old Celina Mays went to bed after church at her family’s home in Willingboro, New Jersey. She was nine months pregnant and due to give birth within weeks. By morning, she was gone, her blankets had been arranged over pillows to make it look as though she was still asleep, while her purse, prenatal vitamins, and other belongings remained behind. No one has ever publicly id...

For more than 200 years, treasure hunters have dug into a small island off Nova Scotia, chasing a story about a mysterious shaft called the Money Pit. Legend says that in 1795, a teenager noticed a strange depression in the ground and found layers of wooden platforms as he dug, before seawater repeatedly flooded every attempt to reach whatever lay below. The theories became bigger with every faile...

Between 1976 and 1986, three young Native American women were murdered, mutilated, and dismembered in Oklahoma City. Their deaths were linked by the apparent care taken to conceal, and degrade their bodies, leading investigators to believe a single unidentified offender was responsible: the Oklahoma City Butcher. The victims were 18-year-old Cathy Lyn Shakelford, found in an abandoned house in 197...

In 1968, a man searching for a well site in rural Kentucky found the body of a young woman wrapped in canvas. She had been strangled and left without identification; for three decades, the grave marker simply read “Tent Girl.” Then amateur researcher Todd Matthews, whose future father-in-law had found her body, became determined to learn her name. In 1997, he created one of the early true-crime id...

In 1985, a hunter found a 55-gallon barrel in the woods near Bear Brook State Park in New Hampshire. Inside were the bodies of a woman and a little girl. Fifteen years later, police found a second barrel nearby containing two more children. For decades, none of the four victims had names. DNA eventually exposed the man investigators believe was responsible: Terry Peder Rasmussen, a serial offender...

In March 1997, deputies entered a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, and found 39 members of Heaven’s Gate dead by suicide. They were dressed alike in black clothing and Nike trainers, lying in neatly prepared beds, one of the most unsettling mass deaths in modern U.S. history. The group, led by Marshall Applewhite, believed human bodies were temporary “containers.” As Comet Hale, Bopp...

In 1974, 28-year-old Karen Silkwood worked at Kerr-McGee’s plutonium fuel plant in Oklahoma. A union activist, she raised alarms about safety failures, radioactive contamination, and alleged falsification of quality-control records, then testified to the Atomic Energy Commission about the risks facing workers. On November 13, she was driving to meet a New York Times reporter and a union official,...

In March 2002, John Darwin paddled his canoe into the North Sea off Seaton Carew and disappeared. Searchers found wreckage, his family mourned, and his wife Anne claimed more than £500,000 in insurance and related payments. But Darwin had not drowned: he was alive, hiding in a bedsit next door to the family home while his two sons believed their father was dead. Five years later, he walked into a...

In 1928, May Donoghue was drinking ginger beer at a café in Paisley when a friend poured the last of an opaque bottle into her glass. Out came the decomposed remains of a snail, something she could not have seen before drinking from it. She later became ill and sued the drink’s manufacturer, David Stevenson. The problem was that May had not bought the drink herself, so she had no contract with the...

In December 2010, 25-year-old landscape architect Joanna Yeates vanished after a night out in Clifton, Bristol. CCTV showed her buying a Tesco pizza on the way home but when detectives searched her flat, the pizza, its wrapping, and even the box were gone. Her body was found on Christmas Day. The case initially fixated on her landlord, Christopher Jefferies, who was later cleared and formally ackn...

In 1483, 12-year-old King Edward V and his nine-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of York, were placed in the Tower of London by their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, while Edward awaited his coronation. Instead, Richard took the crown as Richard III and the boys vanished from public view that summer, never to be seen alive again. Most historians believe the princes were murdered, with Richard I...

At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The blast destroyed much of the building, killed 168 people, including 19 children in a daycare centre and injured hundreds more. The bomber was Timothy McVeigh, a former Army soldier whose anti-government extremism had hardened into violence. He was...