The Unanswered Questions Podcast

The Man in the Iron Mask (died 19 November 1703) was an unidentified prisoner of state, arrested in July 1669 under the pseudonym of "Eustache Dauger" and incarcerated for a period of 34 years during the reign of King Louis XIV of France (1643–1715). Known for remaining unidentified throughout his time in prison, he was held in the custody of the same jailer, Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars, in fo...

The Mad Gasser of Mattoon (also known as the "Anesthetic Prowler," the "Phantom Anesthetist," or simply the "Mad Gasser") was the name given to the person or people believed to be responsible for a series of apparent gas attacks that occurred in Mattoon, Illinois, during the mid-1940s. More than two dozen separate cases of gassings were reported to police over the span of two weeks, in addition to...

The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine (also known by similar names) is, according to legend, a rich gold mine hidden in the southwestern United States. The location is generally believed to be in the Superstition Mountains, near Apache Junction, east of Phoenix, Arizona. There have been many stories about how to find the mine, and each year people search for the mine. Some have died on the search. Contact...

The Father's Day Bank Massacre was a bank robbery and shooting that took place on Sunday, June 16, 1991, at the United Bank Tower (now the Wells Fargo Center) in Denver, Colorado. The perpetrator killed four unarmed bank guards and held up six tellers in the bank's cash vault. An estimated $200,000 was stolen from the bank. Nearly three weeks later, on July 4, 1991, authorities arrested retired po...

The Falling Soldier (full title: Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936) is a black and white photograph by Robert Capa, claimed to have been taken on Saturday, September 5, 1936. It was said to depict the death of a Republican Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL) soldier, during the Battle of Cerro Muriano in the Spanish Civil War. The soldier in th...

Cynthia Elizabeth James (née Hack; June 12, 1944  – c. June 2—June 8, 1989) was a Canadian nurse who disappeared from Richmond, British Columbia, on May 25, 1989. She was found deceased approximately two weeks later in the yard of an abandoned house, hogtied and with a nylon stocking wrapped around her throat. An autopsy indicated that she had died of an overdose of morphine, diazepam, and fl...

South Canterbury Finance was New Zealand's largest locally owned finance company when it collapsed in August 2010, triggering a $1.6 billion bail-out of investors deposits by the New Zealand Government; almost $1b was recovered by receivers. Contact Info: Gmail: theunansweredquestionspodcast@gmail.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/crimeunsolved Blogger: https://theunansweredquestionspodcast.blogspo...

The Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union (FSPDU) was an Australian trade union which existed between 1900 and 1993. It represented labourers in the shipbuilding industry, covering "mostly work associated with chipping, painting, scrubbing [and] cleaning [ships], working in every size of tanks, cleaning boilers, docking and undocking vessels, and rigging work". Contact Info: Gmail: theunanswer...

The Sydney gangland war (or the Gang wars) were a series of murders and killings of several known criminal figures and their associates that took place in Sydney, Australia, during the 1980s. A vast majority of the murders were seen as retributive killings, attempts to control Sydney's drug trade, and expansion of criminal territory. A significant number of the murders that took place during the S...

The Sydney gangland war (or the Gang wars) were a series of murders and killings of several known criminal figures and their associates that took place in Sydney, Australia, during the 1980s. A vast majority of the murders were seen as retributive killings, attempts to control Sydney's drug trade, and expansion of criminal territory. A significant number of the murders that took place during the S...

The Sydney gangland war (or the Gang wars) were a series of murders and killings of several known criminal figures and their associates that took place in Sydney, Australia, during the 1980s. A vast majority of the murders were seen as retributive killings, attempts to control Sydney's drug trade, and expansion of criminal territory. A significant number of the murders that took place during the S...

Michael Nigg (April 28, 1969 – September 8, 1995) was an aspiring actor who worked as a waiter at a Beverly Hills restaurant. He was shot and killed during an apparent robbery attempt in Hollywood. The Los Angeles Police Department later arrested three suspects but soon released them for lack of evidence. No other suspects have ever been identified, and the killing remains unsolved. Brett Ross Can...

Thomas Edward Silverstein (born Thomas Edward Conway; February 4, 1952 – May 11, 2019) was an American criminal who spent the last 42 years of his life in prison after being convicted of four separate murders while imprisoned for armed robbery, one of which was overturned. Silverstein spent the last 36 years of his life in solitary confinement for killing Corrections Officer Merle Clutts at the Ma...

ODESSA is an American codename meaning: Organization of Former SS Members coined in 1946 to cover Nazi underground escape plans at the end of World War II by a group of SS officers with the aim of facilitating secret escape routes, and any directly ensuing arrangements. The idea has been widely circulated in fictional spy novels and movies, including Frederick Forsyth's best-selling thriller The O...

The Alphabet Murders (also known as the Double Initial Murders) are an unsolved series of child murders which occurred between 1971 and 1973 in Rochester, New York. All three victims were girls aged ten or eleven whose surname began with the same letter as that of her first name. Each victim had been sexually assaulted and murdered by either manual or ligature strangulation before her body was dis...

The Publius Enigma is an Internet phenomenon and an unsolved problem that began with cryptic messages posted by a user identifying only as "Publius" to the unmoderated Usenet newsgroup alt.music.pink-floyd through the Penet remailer, a now defunct anonymous information exchange service. The messenger proposed a riddle in connection with the 1994 Pink Floyd album The Division Bell, promising that t...

The Superman curse refers to a series of supposedly related misfortunes that have plagued creative people involved in adaptations of the DC Comics character Superman in various media, particularly actors who have played the role of Superman on film and television. The "curse" is frequently associated with George Reeves, who starred in Adventures of Superman on television from 1952 to 1958, and die...

OneCoin is a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme conducted by offshore companies OneCoin Ltd, based in Bulgaria and registered in Dubai, and OneLife Network Ltd (registered in Belize), both founded by Ruja Ignatova in concert with Sebastian Greenwood. OneCoin is considered a Ponzi scheme due to its organisational structure of paying early investors using money obtained from newer ones. It was also a...

Since the mid-1970s, a variety of conspiracy theories have emerged regarding British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who served as the prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976. These range from Wilson having been a Soviet agent (a claim which MI5 investigated and found to be false), to Wilson being the victim of treasonous plots by conservative-leaning elements...

The Paris Gun was the name given to a type of German long-range siege gun, several of which were used to bombard Paris during World War I. They were in service from March to August 1918. When the guns were first employed, Parisians believed they had been bombed by a high-altitude Zeppelin, as the sound of neither an aeroplane nor a gun could be heard. They were the largest pieces of artillery used...

The Monster with 21 Faces was a name (based on Edogawa Rampo's fictional villain "The Fiend with Twenty Faces") used as an alias by the group responsible for the blackmail letters in the Glico Morinaga case in Japan, in 1984. Variations of the name's translation, including “the Mystery Man with the 21 Faces” and “the Phantom with 21 Faces”, have also been used in articles and books featuring the c...

Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is the pseudoscientific concept of the spontaneous combustion of a living (or recently deceased) human body without an apparent external source of ignition. In addition to reported cases, descriptions of the alleged phenomenon appear in literature, and both types have been observed to share common characteristics in terms of circumstances and the remains of the v...

In 1965, the government established Bank Bumiputra Malaysia Berhad (BBMB) in order to help Bumiputras get more involved in economic activities. BBMB’s first chairman was Tengku Razaleigh, who later became Finance Minister Bumiputra Malaysia Finance (BMF) was set up in 1974 as a subsidiary of BBMB and started operating in Hong Kong in 1977. By 1980, BBMB was receiving RM50 milli...

Richard John Charles Tomlinson (born 13 January 1963) is a former officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). He argued that he was subjected to unfair dismissal from MI6 in 1995, and attempted to take his former employer to a tribunal. MI6 refused, arguing that to do so would breach state security. Tomlinson was imprisoned under the Official Secrets Act 1989 in 1997 after he gave a...

The Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal started in 2009 when representatives of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores received a large number of clay bullae and tablets originating in the ancient Near East. The artifacts were intended for the Museum of the Bible, funded by the Evangelical Christian Green family, which owns the Oklahoma-based chain. Internal staff had warned superiors that the items had...