Mysteries and Histories

In the early 1870s, young boys in Boston survived brutal attacks by another child: Jesse Pomeroy. At just 12, he was sent to reform school for torturing children but after his early release, the violence escalated into murder. In 1874, 10-year-old Katie Curran disappeared, and four-year-old Horace Millen was found murdered. Pomeroy, then 14, was arrested for Millen’s death before workmen discovere...

His name is on some of the most famous plays ever written, but could William Shakespeare have been a cover for someone else? Centuries after his death, gaps in his biography fuelled theories that the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon could not have created such extraordinary works. Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, have all been proposed as the hidden author. Sup...

Throughout the 1980s, women and girls were found murdered near Ohio highways and truck stops. Several victims were sex workers, and investigators suspected a killer who travelled the interstate routes. One chilling lead gave the case its name: a truck driver reportedly used the CB radio handle “Dr. No. Witness accounts and similarities between the deaths suggested a connection, but investigators s...

In August 1951, hundreds of people in the French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit fell ill with stomach pains, insomnia, and terrifying hallucinations. Some believed animals were attacking them; others became dangerously disoriented. Several people died, and dozens were admitted to psychiatric hospitals as doctors struggled to explain the outbreak. Investigators traced the poisoning to bread from a local...

In January 1989, Chicago television station WMAQ ended its overnight broadcast with a haunting missing-person notice: a grainy photograph, the name Joanna Lopez, and a phone number. There was no age, no description, and no explanation of when or where she had disappeared. Decades later, the footage drew internet sleuths into a mystery with remarkably little evidence. Researchers reported finding n...

On October 13, 1972, a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team, relatives, and friends crashed high in the Andes while travelling to Chile. There were 45 people aboard. Those who survived the impact faced freezing temperatures, serious injuries, and almost no food, then an avalanche buried their makeshift shelter inside the wreckage, killing eight more. With rescue no longer coming and their supplie...

On March 18, 1937, a massive explosion tore through a school in New London, Texas, shortly before the end of the school day. Nearly 300 people, most of them children, were killed as the building collapsed, turning an ordinary afternoon into the deadliest school disaster in U.S. To save money, the school had switched to a nearby oil company’s residue gas supply. A faulty connection allowed odorless...

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...