Tales From the Glovebox

In February of 1977, a woman named Teresita finished her shift at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, walked home to her apartment on the north side, and let someone she knew through her front door. That night, the apartment burned. By the time firefighters got inside, Teresita was already dead. Chicago homicide detectives had almost nothing to work with. The fire had destroyed most of the physical evi...

In the summer of 1906, a New York banker named Charles Warren rented a house in Oyster Bay, Long Island for his family. Eleven people were staying there. By August, six had come down with typhoid fever. The Warrens hired a sanitation engineer named George Soper to find the source. He traced it back to one woman: the cook. She was an Irish immigrant in her late thirties who had spent nearly a decad...

A 1987 unsolved broadcast hijacking in Chicago, retold for true crime fans, mystery listeners, and anyone who grew up watching late night television. On a Sunday night in November 1987, the nine o'clock news was on in Chicago. The sportscaster was running through weekend scores when the picture disappeared. What replaced him was a figure in a rubber mask, swaying in front of a sheet of corrugated...

In the fall of 1953, a woman walked into a Catholic school in Kansas City and told the nuns that one of their students had a family emergency. She said she was his aunt. The nuns released 6-year-old Bobby Greenlease into her care. Bobby was never seen alive again. Bobby's father, Robert Greenlease, had built one of the largest car dealerships in the Midwest and was worth millions. By that afte...

In December 1938, a 29-year-old British stockbroker canceled a ski trip and ended up in Prague. With a card table and a typewriter in a hotel room, he started a rescue operation nobody had asked him to start. His name was Nicholas Winton. He had gone to Prague to visit a friend at a refugee organization focused on adults. Nobody was doing anything for the children. Nicholas had been in the city le...

In the spring of 1979, a six-year-old boy in lower Manhattan woke up excited. His parents had finally said yes to something he had been asking about for weeks. He could walk to the school bus stop by himself. It was only two blocks away, past stores the family knew, through a neighborhood where everyone recognized everyone. His mother watched from the fire escape as he headed down the street in hi...

On a Saturday afternoon in October 1984, a fire broke out inside a hardware store in South Pasadena, California. It moved fast. By the time the alarm went off, four people were trapped. A woman named Ada Fair. A two-year-old named Matthew Troydill. Two other people who had gone out to run a weekend errand. None of them made it out. When investigators arrived they knew immediately this was not an a...

In March of 1928, a nine-year-old boy named Walter Collins left his home in Los Angeles with some money for the movies and never came back. His mother Christine was already raising him alone. Walter's father was in prison. She worked long shifts at the telephone company and paid every bill herself. When Walter disappeared, she waited. For five months she heard nothing. Then the police called w...

In October of 1947, a logger working a timber cut in Stanley Park, just outside Vancouver, found small bones half-buried near a cedar tree. The bones of children. Police found two skeletons in a shallow grave that had been there for years. A forensic examiner said one was a boy and one was a girl, both around six or seven years old, dead since the late 1930s or early 1940s. Nobody knew who they we...

In December of 1932, a drifter died on the side of a road outside Clarendon, Arkansas, alone in the cold with nothing but a knapsack nearby. That would have been the end of the story, except three years earlier this same man had done something nobody could explain. He had walked into a courthouse and testified at the trial for his own murder. Nobody had the full story at the time. The truth of wha...

On the night of December 28, 1956, two sisters left their home in Chicago to see Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender. Barbara was 15. Patricia was 12. They had already seen the movie eleven times and begged their mom for one more showing. She said yes, told them to be home by midnight, and they promised they would be. They never came home. What followed became the largest missing persons investigation...

On the night of June 11, 1994, a couple was driving home on Highway 50 through the Sierra Nevada mountains when the woman spotted a figure on the shoulder. A woman in torn, dirty clothes, arms up, waving. Pointing down toward the edge of the road like she needed them to look at something. The husband hit the brakes and backed up, but when the headlights swung back around, there was nobody there. T...

In 1969, a young woman named Diane Linkletter fell from the sixth floor of her Los Angeles apartment building. She was twenty years old and the daughter of Art Linkletter, one of the most beloved television hosts in America. Within hours, the story was everywhere. Her father went on national television and told the world that LSD had killed his daughter. The headlines ran it. Schools taught it. Po...

On a Sunday morning in February 1986, a twenty-nine-year-old nurse named Sherri Rasmussen was home alone in her San Fernando Valley house. She had been married three months. Her husband John had just left on a business trip. When he came back, he found her on the living room floor. She had been beaten and shot three times. The house had been gone through, drawers open, a few items missing. It look...

A nine-year-old girl got a pink bike for Christmas and hadn't stopped riding it since. On a January afternoon in 1996, she asked her grandmother if she could ride to the empty parking lot a couple of blocks away. Her grandmother said yes. Eight minutes later, her little brother came home alone. Twenty minutes after that, her grandmother walked to that parking lot and found the pink bike lying...

On the morning of September 1, 2015, Lieutenant Charles Gliniewicz of the Fox Lake Police Department radioed dispatch to report that he was following 3 suspicious men near an abandoned cement plant at the edge of town. He gave descriptions. Then he went silent. Officers found him in the tall grass near the marsh minutes later. He was dead from a gunshot wound. Within hours, one of the largest manh...

In November of 1985, a 67-year-old retired man named Dexter Stefonek was driving home to Wisconsin after spending a few months in Oregon with his son and grandchildren. It was bitter cold across Montana. He had been making good time, driving straight through, stopping only when he had to. Late one night, he pulled into a rest stop along the interstate. By morning, his car was a burned-out shell st...

In the summer of 1976, one of the most beloved child stars in American television history was found dead at a friend's house in Oceanside, California. She was eighteen years old. Her name was Anissa Jones, and millions of families knew her as Buffy Davis on the CBS sitcom Family Affair, one of the most watched shows on television in the late 1960s. For years, the story people told about her wa...

In December 1997, a house fire broke out in a Philadelphia neighborhood. Maria Diaz was twenty-five years old with three kids, including a ten-day-old baby girl named Sofia. When the fire started Maria ran upstairs to get Sofia but couldn't reach the nursery. It took three people to drag her out of the house. When firefighters searched the burned-out room afterward, they found no body, no bone...

In the summer of 1942, someone was slipping into homes in Pascagoula, Mississippi, while people slept. No money was taken. Nothing was damaged. The only thing missing in the morning was hair, cut from the heads of sleeping women and girls while they lay in their beds. The intruder left through a sliced window screen and was gone before anyone woke up. The town had no idea who was doing it or why....

In the small town of Strasburg, Pennsylvania, there is a stretch of road that locals have whispered about for generations. The old grist mill along the creek had a reputation. People called it Hell's Funnel. The story that passed from parent to child was always the same: a mill owner lost his hand in the waterwheel, his wife watched him die, and grief drove her to take her own life. From that...

On a hot July afternoon in 1976, two men exploring an abandoned mine shaft in the Mojave Desert outside Nipton, California found a body at the bottom wrapped in a green sleeping bag. The victim was a woman between twenty-five and forty years old, shot in the back with a shotgun at close range. No identification, no witnesses, nothing stolen. Whoever killed her had stripped away anything with her n...

On the night of April 13, 2011, an 86-year-old man named Patrick Carnes was driving westbound on Interstate 80 through northern Nevada, about six hours from home. He stopped at a truck stop, got coffee, let his dog out, and got back on the road. A state trooper pulled him over for following a semi too close. Patrick explained himself calmly: he didn't like driving alone at night and the trucke...

In the summer of 1972, a twenty-three-year-old folk singer named Sarah McKenna walked out of a Nashville recording studio, told the engineer she would be back in an hour, and was never seen again. She left behind an unfinished album, a manager who had no idea where she had gone, and a mother she had barely spoken to in years. Her car disappeared with her. No credit card charges. No phone calls. No...

In July 1983, a 19-year-old beauty queen named Tammy Lynn Leppert walked out of her house in Cocoa Beach, Florida, got into a car with a man she knew, and was never seen again. She left her purse in the car. She left her flip-flops in the car. She walked away barefoot, five miles from home, in the middle of the day. That was the last confirmed sighting anyone ever had of her. In the months before...