# 4 Disturbing Cold Cases That Stumped Detectives | 230

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 13 May 2026, 40 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO4622244704.mp3

Join me for 4 disturbing cold cases that stumped detectives. Episode 230 of the true crime podcast btw. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: 🛍️ Merch: https://lazy-chill-zone-shop.fourthwall.com ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 unsolved mysteries, true crime, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, missing persons, murder investigation, forensic evidence, serial killers, crime scene analysis, dark history, criminal psychology, real life horror, police investigations, DNA breakthroughs, forensic genealogy, crime documentaries, criminal profiling, mysterious disappearances, solved cases, justice system, law enforcement stories, cold case files, creepy mysteries, true crime storytelling, crime reconstruction, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, disturbing cases, true crime analysis, hidden clues, infamous crimes, real crime stories, forensic evidence, heists, art theft

## Transcript

[0:00] He always seemed to drive a red Jeep with a white top, and he
[0:03] always seemed to find his targets in the same two blocks
[0:06] of Harbor City, somewhere in the window between dinner and
[0:09] bedtime. Between January and May of 1993,
[0:14] he pulled up. 4 * 3 men were gone before paramedics arrived.
[0:20] The 4th was hit three times. But he somehow stayed alive long
[0:23] enough to give investigators a face and a place to start.
[0:28] The truly haunting thing about this unsolved mystery, though,
[0:31] is who the shooter turned out to be and why he may have been
[0:35] targeting these men. Harbor City sits at the bottom
[0:40] of the Los Angeles map, a narrow finger of neighborhood that runs
[0:44] S toward the port at San Pedro. It's working class, hemmed in by
[0:49] freeways in the Pacific Coast Highway, the kind of place where
[0:53] bungalows back up to apartment courtyards.
[0:56] To outsiders, it was just another patch of South Bay
[1:00] sprawl. To the people who called it
[1:02] home, it had its own rhythm that this serial predator would
[1:06] exploit. Los Angeles in 1993 was still
[1:11] raw, and the riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King
[1:14] beating case had only been the previous spring.
[1:18] The city's crime rate sat near its modern peak, and detectives
[1:22] in the area were carrying caseloads now considered
[1:25] unmanageable. But this predator was going to
[1:28] break the mold of the usual case files detectives were handling
[1:31] in a very significant and disturbing way.
[1:35] The first attack came on the night of January 31st, 1993, at
[1:39] around 9:00. Howard Campbell, 32 years old,
[1:44] was outside a building at 1087 W 200 52nd St. when he was
[1:49] brutally gunned down in cold blood.
[1:52] There wasn't much to work with at first.
[1:55] The shooter had fired from a vehicle and driven off, which in
[1:58] 1993 Los Angeles wasn't exactly an unusual signature.
[2:04] Dr. Bys had become so common that local detectives units
[2:07] sometimes process them with grim efficiency, working the gang
[2:11] angle and the disgruntled acquaintance angle in tandem.
[2:15] Witnesses to the Campbell shooting reportedly described a
[2:18] man in some sort of Jeep, but that description sat in a file
[2:22] alongside thousands of other partial leads without a
[2:26] connection to a larger pattern. There was no reason yet to treat
[2:30] the case as anything other than what it appeared to be, which
[2:33] was another life cut down on the streets of LA.
[2:38] On the night of February 14th, 1993, a man named Michael Kevin
[2:43] Meter was standing in front of the same address where the
[2:46] previous attack took place. He was shot down on the same
[2:50] patch of sidewalk in front of the same building, and the
[2:54] repeat location was on its own, jarring 2 men on the same block
[3:01] in front of the same door, gone within 14 days of each other.
[3:06] The cops investigated if this was a dispute between rival gang
[3:09] factions over turf, but the two men who were slain had no gang
[3:14] affiliations whatsoever. One incident could be
[3:18] potentially dismissed as a case of mistaken identity, but two
[3:22] incidents made that seem highly improbable.
[3:24] To say the least, that kind of pattern didn't fit anything.
[3:28] Investigators had been working in 1993, and with the gang
[3:32] theory out of the way, other, more unconventional theories
[3:36] took hold. One theory was that someone
[3:39] connected to that specific address had become a target, and
[3:43] that whoever was being aimed at hadn't yet been hit.
[3:48] The second theory was that whoever was behind it wanted
[3:51] everyone connected to that address gone.
[3:54] Not necessarily dead, but just cleared out.
[3:59] It's a very small apartment unit with four to six units, and for
[4:03] whatever reason the cops thought someone may have wanted it
[4:06] empty. Either of those theories would
[4:09] have implied A focused grievance and a relatively short list of
[4:13] suspects, but the people in and around the building reportedly
[4:18] couldn't point to enemies who might explain it.
[4:21] Two months passed, and the block on W 200 52nd St. stayed under a
[4:26] kind of quiet pressure, waiting for what would happen next.
[4:30] And then on April 15th, 1993, the shooter resurfaced 2 blocks
[4:36] over at 1039 W 200 54th St. The victim was 26 year old
[4:44] Joseph Alexander Maxwell. According to what investigators
[4:47] later disclosed, Maxwell wasn't simply caught in the open and
[4:52] fired upon from a passing vehicle.
[4:55] He approached the vehicle. And there's a meaningful
[4:57] distinction in that detail. Whatever happened in the seconds
[5:01] before the shooting, Maxwell walked toward whoever was
[5:04] sitting inside the Jeep. That detail reshapes the picture
[5:08] of the man behind the wheel, since he wasn't only ambushing
[5:11] strangers from a distance. The 4th attack came on May 22nd,
[5:17] 1993 on the 1100 block of W 200 53rd St. splitting the
[5:24] geographic difference between the prior locations.
[5:27] The target was a 38 year old man whose name was kept out of the
[5:31] press. He was shot 3 times, and he
[5:34] lived to tell the tale. That single fact that one of the
[5:39] four was still breathing when the paramedics arrived changed
[5:42] the case. Until that night, investigators
[5:46] had pieces such as Ballistics and partial accounts from
[5:50] neighbors who'd glimpsed a Jeep on a dark street.
[5:54] They had a likely connection between 3 crime scenes in a
[5:57] tight geographic cluster. What they didn't have was anyone
[6:01] who could describe the man with the gun, and this changed the
[6:04] focus of the case in a big way. The survivor told them the
[6:09] shooter was a white man with red hair, somewhere between 25 and
[6:13] 35 years old, who was driving a Jeep.
[6:18] Earlier, witnesses had described essentially the same vehicle,
[6:21] red with a white top. Three of the four attacks had
[6:25] taken place between roughly 8 and 9:30 at night, so all the
[6:29] pieces fit together. By the time the cops were ready
[6:33] to go public, the detectives were confident they were chasing
[6:36] one person. And yeah, you heard me right
[6:39] there. They didn't let the community
[6:41] know that there was a serial predator on the loose for quite
[6:44] some time. On May 29th, 1993, only a week
[6:50] after the survivor was attacked, the Los Angeles Police
[6:53] Department publicly acknowledged the attacks.
[6:56] They also indicated that whoever this was appeared to be
[7:00] methodically picking off black men after dark.
[7:02] A composite sketch followed in early July, and it showed a
[7:08] white man with light hair and an unremarkable face, the sort of
[7:12] face that doesn't immediately announce itself in a crowd.
[7:16] The Jeep was the detail that anchored every report.
[7:19] Since a red Jeep with a white top isn't common, investigators
[7:24] had reason to believe somebody, somewhere had noticed that
[7:29] vehicle, and they asked anyone with information to come
[7:32] forward. The phones rang, with many
[7:35] reporting the vehicle, but the leads dried up quickly.
[7:40] There are a few ways to read what happened in Harbor City in
[7:43] the spring of 1993, and none of them are tidy.
[7:48] The most immediate question was the one investigators wouldn't
[7:51] commit to publicly. Every confirmed victim was
[7:54] black, and the apparent perpetrator was, according to
[7:58] the one surviving witness, white.
[8:02] But the detectives wouldn't say out loud what the pattern seemed
[8:04] to imply, and they never have. That said, they were able to say
[8:09] one thing for certain. Robbery wasn't a motivating
[8:13] factor, and nothing had been taken from any of the victims.
[8:19] Another reading is that the shooter had some private
[8:21] connection to that one specific block.
[8:24] The repeated appearances potentially hint at a grudge
[8:27] tethered to the address he hit twice, or perhaps to the
[8:31] neighborhood as a whole. Some have speculated that the
[8:34] shooter may have been an enforcer for any variety of
[8:37] criminal organizations. The neighborhood had significant
[8:42] problems with drugs and gangs, and some think the attacks may
[8:46] have been done to send a disturbing message. 1/3 theory
[8:50] is that the shooter was the kind of offender who fixates on a
[8:53] place and a type of person, and who treats his actual victims as
[8:57] effectively interchangeable. The closeness of the geography
[9:02] and the consistent evening timing, combined with a
[9:06] willingness to return again and again to the same square of
[9:09] pavement fit that profile uncomfortably well.
[9:13] To me though, this seems to be a confirmation of the first theory
[9:17] put in language designed not to spread alarm or potentially
[9:21] because the LAPD had no real interest in solving the crimes.
[9:27] The thing about this that doesn't make a lot of sense to
[9:30] me is that such targeted attacks would have triggered support
[9:34] from the FBI. Personally, this leads me to
[9:37] question if the shooter could have been someone connected to
[9:40] the police in some way. That doesn't necessarily mean a
[9:44] cop by any means, but it could mean that the person who did it
[9:47] or ordered it was a confidential informant on a big case.
[9:51] Naturally, having this sort of activity tied to a key witness
[9:55] in a big upcoming trial would potentially torpedo the case.
[10:00] It's an extremely dark theory, and I have to stress that it's
[10:03] highly speculative with no evidence to back it up, but this
[10:07] simply doesn't sit right with me at all.
[10:11] There's one more thing worth sitting with.
[10:14] The attack stopped whatever was driving the man in the Jeep, The
[10:18] pattern simply ended after May of 1993.
[10:23] Serial offenders who behave this way tend to keep going until
[10:26] they're caught or stopped by some outside force.
[10:30] Nothing in the public record suggests an arrest, and Harbor
[10:33] City and Los Angeles more broadly didn't see another wave
[10:37] of similar shootings. Some believe that this bolsters
[10:42] the theory that while the attacks on the individuals may
[10:44] not have been targeted, the neighborhood itself may have
[10:48] been targeted by an organized crime group.
[10:51] By the late summer of 1993, the trail had gone cold.
[10:56] No witness ever stepped forward with a name or a license plate,
[11:00] and nobody called in a neighbor with red hair and a red Jeep.
[11:04] The shooter never struck again, at least not in any pattern
[11:07] Anyone has been able to connect back to Harbor City.
[11:11] More than 30 years on, the case remains open, though it remains
[11:16] unclear to me if there is any serious ongoing investigation
[11:19] into the case. The names of the dead Howard
[11:23] Campbell, Michael Kevin Meter and Joseph Alexander Maxwell sit
[11:28] on the long, slow list of Los Angeles cold cases that have
[11:32] never been closed. Unfortunately, as you may have
[11:37] noticed, there's no confirmed images of the victims out there
[11:40] online. And trust me, I looked back into
[11:43] newspaper archives as well. I say it's unfortunate because
[11:47] that does a lot of work to generate public interest in a
[11:50] case and put real faces to the names of the victims.
[11:54] The man with the red hair, for his part, if he's still alive,
[11:59] is now in his late 50s or 60s. The case itself never picked up
[12:03] the cultural momentum that carried other early 90s Los
[12:06] Angeles cold cases into documentaries or onto true crime
[12:10] videos. Anyway, I think this is a case
[12:13] that deserves another serious look, and the only way it will
[12:17] ever get that is if enough people take an interest and want
[12:20] to see a resolution. Five days before he was beaten
[12:27] to death in his own kitchen, Victor Killian turned 88 years
[12:31] old. Five days before that, the man
[12:34] who lived a few blocks away, an actor he'd shared a sound stage
[12:38] with only weeks earlier, was found bludgeoned in nearly
[12:42] identical circumstances. The first attack was solved
[12:46] within two weeks, but the second has never been solved at all.
[12:50] The strangest detail isn't the timing or the coincidence.
[12:54] It's the door. The detective on Killian's case
[12:57] told the Los Angeles Times that the apartment had been locked in
[13:00] a way that suggested whoever did this had walked in with a key.
[13:06] Victor Killian was born in Wilkes Barre, PA, on the 6th of
[13:10] March 1891. By the time he was 14, he'd
[13:15] already left home to scrape together a living in vaudeville,
[13:18] and he kept at it long enough that when talkies arrived, he
[13:21] made the jump to film. Tall, Gaunt, with a hang dog
[13:26] face and a voice that could land a threat or a punch line
[13:29] depending on what the script needed, he became one of those
[13:32] character actors audiences recognized.
[13:36] Over A4 decade run, he turned up in well over 100 pictures,
[13:40] including The Oxbow Incident, Reap the Wild Wind, and Modern
[13:44] Times opposite Charlie Chaplin. He lost his right eye on the
[13:48] Reap the Wild Wind set in 1942 when a piece of equipment struck
[13:53] him during a storm sequence and wore a glass replacement for the
[13:57] rest of his life. This didn't slow him down and he
[14:01] kept working at a good clip after despite this incident.
[14:06] What did slow him down was the House UN American Activities
[14:09] Committee. Killian had run with the Group
[14:12] Theater Crowd in the 1930s, a leftist circle of New York
[14:16] actors and writers, and that was enough to put his name on the
[14:20] lists. By the early 1950s, a man who'd
[14:24] been a working actor for 30 years couldn't get hired for a
[14:28] regional commercial. He took the option a fair number
[14:32] of blacklisted Americans took in those years and boarded a ship
[14:36] for England. During that period, he picked up
[14:39] small parts in British theater and television and tried to wait
[14:43] out the worst of the era. He didn't return to American
[14:46] screens in any serious way until the late 1960s, by which point
[14:50] he was nearly 80. Then Norman Lear, the legendary
[14:55] producer behind hits like All in the Family and The Jeffersons,
[14:59] came knocking. Lear was developing A satirical
[15:03] soap opera based on a housewife called Mary Hartman who
[15:07] experienced weird and disturbing events.
[15:10] The description of the show sounds absolutely bizarre, and
[15:14] the role Killian played really drives home how weird it was.
[15:19] The show needed a recurring oddity.
[15:21] Well, it needed many of them, but it also needed an elderly
[15:24] local creep who exposed himself. Lear cast Killian, and almost
[15:30] overnight, the Fernwood Flasher became one of the show's
[15:33] breakout figures. Despite the strange nature of
[15:36] the character, audiences like to see a familiar old face back on
[15:41] the screen. There was also some shock that a
[15:44] legitimate actor, a real veteran of the golden age of the
[15:47] Hollywood studio system, was playing such a controversial
[15:51] role. For Killian, this was the second
[15:54] life his acting career needed. By the late 1970s, Killian was
[15:59] working steadily again, picking up small roles on All in the
[16:02] Family and the occasional film cameo.
[16:06] Everything was coming up Victor Killian, as was the style at the
[16:10] time, for a brief period in the 70s.
[16:13] Here's where it gets unsettling, and where everyone from
[16:17] detectives to amateur sleuths have been trying to make
[16:20] connections ever since. On the 6th of March 1979,
[16:26] Killian's 88th birthday, another character actor named Charles
[16:30] Wagenheim was beaten to death in his own Hollywood apartment.
[16:35] This was only a few blocks from where Killian lived.
[16:39] Wagenheim was 83, also a long running studio era player, and
[16:43] as it happened, he and Killian had recently filmed an episode
[16:46] of All in the Family together. Wagenheim's case was solved
[16:51] relatively quickly. His live in caregiver, a woman
[16:54] named Stephanie Boone, had been forging checks to steal his
[16:58] money. Five days later, on the evening
[17:02] of the 11th of March 1979, Killian came home from a grocery
[17:07] run to his apartment at the Lido in Hollywood.
[17:10] By every account, he was preparing a late night snack
[17:13] when whoever was waiting for him made their move.
[17:16] When friends discovered Killian the next morning, the apartment
[17:20] had been ransacked and the man himself had been beaten with
[17:23] extreme ferocity. Whoever did this use their hands
[17:27] and whatever else was within reach to inflict that level of
[17:30] damage on someone who weighed maybe 140 lbs and walked with a
[17:34] cane, the detective who handled the case told the Los Angeles
[17:39] Times. Something that stuck with people
[17:42] ever since. The door of the apartment had
[17:45] been locked in a manner that suggested the assailant entered
[17:48] with a pass key, the kind of building manager or maintenance
[17:52] worker would carry. There was no broken window or
[17:55] forced entry, and no neighbor reported a stranger lurking in
[17:59] the hall. Detectives canvassed the
[18:01] building, interviewed tenants and on site staff, and chased
[18:05] down anyone Killian had been in contact with during his last few
[18:08] days but came back with nothing. What was missing was modest a
[18:14] small amount of cash, a watch and, according to some accounts,
[18:19] a couple of personal items from a side table.
[18:22] That was effectively it. Killian wasn't wealthy and had
[18:26] no living family he was close to.
[18:28] Whatever modest estate he left wasn't worth fighting over.
[18:32] He owed no money and had no known enemies, and nothing about
[18:36] his life suggested the kind of target a planned robbery would
[18:39] normally pick. The unforced entry has been the
[18:43] thing that's bothered investigators and amateur
[18:45] sleuths most in the years since. It points to one of three
[18:49] possibilities, and each one has its problems.
[18:53] Either Killian opened the door himself for someone he
[18:56] recognized, in which case the person was someone he knew well
[19:00] enough to let inside late at night while he was making a
[19:03] sandwich. Or the assailant had a master
[19:06] key. Or a duplicate which would point
[19:08] at building staff, a former tenant, or a maintenance worker
[19:12] who'd held onto 1. Some have suggested that he may
[19:16] have been attacked by a support worker, though no evidence has
[19:19] ever come forward that he had used one, even occasionally.
[19:23] Some have also speculated that someone Killian had only just
[19:27] met that evening had talked his way upstairs with him.
[19:31] There's a long standing piece of speculation, never officially
[19:35] confirmed, that he'd been in a nearby bar earlier that night
[19:39] and may have walked someone home with him.
[19:43] The detail is murky and rests on second hand accounts, but it's
[19:47] been quietly repeated in coverage of the case for
[19:50] decades. If it's true, it would account
[19:54] for the unforced entry without needing to invoke a building
[19:57] staff member with a master key. This detail seems to implicitly
[20:02] rest on the unfounded assumption that the old actor may have been
[20:05] closeted. However, even a brief
[20:09] examination of the historical facts surrounding his life make
[20:12] this incredibly unlikely. He was married for most of his
[20:16] adult life, which of course doesn't disprove someone was
[20:19] closeted. In the time we're talking about,
[20:22] however, every detail of his life was examined in lurid
[20:25] detail by the House UN American Activities Committee.
[20:29] If there had been even the faintest whisper that his wife
[20:32] was just cover for his true identity, this would have almost
[20:35] certainly been raised during the blacklisting process.
[20:40] What this case isn't, by any reasonable estimate, is
[20:43] connected to Wagenheim's slaying, despite theories that
[20:46] have tried to connect the two. Wagenheim's caregiver was
[20:50] already in custody by the time Killian was attacked, and
[20:53] there's no plausible link between her and Killian himself.
[20:58] Whatever the relationship between the two cases is, it
[21:01] lives somewhere in the realm of grim coincidence rather than any
[21:05] kind of serial attack. 2 elderly character actors, five days and
[21:10] a handful of blocks apart, both beaten in their apartments.
[21:15] Both even appeared together recently in an episode of
[21:18] network television that hadn't actually aired yet.
[21:22] It's the kind of thing that if you tried to write it as
[21:25] fiction, an editor would tell you to dial back because no one
[21:29] is buying it. I think that's what makes the
[21:33] theory that there was some sort of connection between the
[21:35] attacks so enduring. It's simply hard for our brains,
[21:40] trained in pattern recognition, that what appears to be such a
[21:43] strong pattern is all noise, no signal.
[21:48] Nobody was ever arrested for what happened to Victor Killian,
[21:51] and no suspect was ever named publicly.
[21:55] The detectives who handled the original investigation are long
[21:58] gone now, too, and the file has long since gone cold.
[22:03] Any of the witnesses who might have remembered something useful
[22:07] are presumably gone, themselves or elderly.
[22:10] There's a grim irony that an actor who'd survived so much
[22:14] only to end up with one last unlikely taste of fame was
[22:18] brutally slain at the height of his comeback.
[22:25] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy. As usual, just dropping my usual
[22:28] reminder to hit the subscribe button and tap the notification
[22:31] bell. Also, don't forget to check out
[22:34] the Patreon or the membership to take your support for my channel
[22:37] to the next level. On a quiet Sunday morning in
[22:43] June 2001, one of the most gifted mathematical minds the
[22:47] United States had ever quietly imported wheeled his dark Green
[22:51] Mountain bike out of a townhouse.
[22:54] He went on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, left a forward note in
[22:58] Russian on the kitchen counter and rode off into the sunset.
[23:02] He told his parents he was going to a library.
[23:06] He didn't bring his medication. By 10 that night, his family was
[23:10] on the phone with police. Alexander Leonidovich Kazanov
[23:15] was born in May 1979 in Leningrad, the city we now call
[23:20] Saint Petersburg. In the final years of the Soviet
[23:24] Union, his father, Leonid, taught mathematics for a living.
[23:29] His mother, Anna, helped raise a son who, by the time he could
[23:32] read fluently, was already taking apart problems most
[23:36] adults couldn't even parse. He was placed in a specialized
[23:40] school for mathematically gifted children, sitting in classrooms
[23:44] with kids years older than he was and somehow keeping right up
[23:47] with them. In 1992, when Alexander was
[23:52] about 13, the family arrived in the United States and settled in
[23:57] the Parkville neighborhood of Brooklyn.
[24:00] He enrolled at Stuyvesant High School, the legendary public
[24:03] magnet school that's produced more Nobel laureates and Fields
[24:08] medalists than most countries. He thrived there, but thrived
[24:13] under cells. What happened to a significant
[24:15] degree? In the summer of 1994, at 15, he
[24:20] was the youngest member of the United States team at the
[24:23] International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong.
[24:28] That team did something no team in the competition's history had
[24:31] ever done before, with every one of its six members achieving a
[24:35] perfect score. The following spring, he was the
[24:38] youngest finalist at the 1995 Westinghouse Science Talent
[24:42] Search. He presented work on a variation
[24:45] of one of the most famous open problems in number theory and
[24:49] walked out with 7th place and a $10,000 scholarship.
[24:54] And just to be clear, his competitors were virtually all
[24:58] adults who were highly accomplished in mathematics.
[25:02] Coming 7th place in this field was truly astounding, and the
[25:06] word genius began to be tossed around by people who would
[25:10] generally be described by others as such.
[25:14] That same summer, while most American teenagers were figuring
[25:17] out how to get a learner's permit, he passed the qualifying
[25:21] exams for Penn State's doctoral program in mathematics.
[25:25] Highly accomplished mathematicians were buzzing
[25:28] about his potential, calling him the second coming of Euler, of
[25:32] Gauss, of John von Neumann. Let's just say the pressure was
[25:38] on to a fairly significant degree, but Alexander was, above
[25:42] all, still a teenager. For a few years, the trajectory
[25:48] looked unstoppable. He moved to State College, PA
[25:52] and worked on abstract algebra. But brilliance and stability
[25:56] don't always travel together, and by his early 20s, Alexander
[26:00] was struggling with what those closest to him described as
[26:03] bipolar disorder. He was prescribed mood
[26:07] stabilizing medication, and when he took it consistently, he
[26:11] functioned well. When he didn't, the gap between
[26:15] him and the rest of the world widened in ways that worried
[26:18] everyone who loved him. The problem for Alexander is
[26:22] that when he took the medication, he believed at the
[26:25] very least that he couldn't function at maximal capacity.
[26:30] For him, this was a fate that was worse than anything else, so
[26:34] he routinely went off his medication, often with
[26:37] disastrous results. And to put this in context, the
[26:42] amount of pressure he faced was truly enormous, so any potential
[26:47] perceived reduction in abilities was outsized.
[26:50] By the spring of 2001, he'd taken a formal semester leave
[26:55] from his doctoral program and moved back into the family home
[26:58] in Brooklyn. He was 22 years old and the plan
[27:02] was to rest, recover, and eventually return to State
[27:06] College and the dissertation waiting for him the morning of
[27:11] Sunday, June 10th, began like any other.
[27:14] Alexander got up, dressed in a red long sleeved shirt, brown
[27:18] velvet trousers and black sneakers, and clipped a small
[27:21] black pouch around his waist. He left a short handwritten note
[27:26] on the counter in Russian. Translated, it was almost banal
[27:30] in its ordinariness, saying simply that he had gone to a
[27:34] library. He took his dark Green Mountain
[27:37] bike, and notably, it was found that he had stopped taking his
[27:41] medication in the days prior to the disappearance.
[27:45] Investigators would later mark that as the single most worrying
[27:48] detail of the morning. But I'm getting ahead of myself
[27:51] here. His parents weren't immediately
[27:54] alarmed, because long, solitary trips weren't unusual for him,
[27:59] and a library was a believable destination for a man who'd
[28:02] spent his life inside books. But ten in the evening came and
[28:07] went with no call, no key turning in the lock, and their
[28:11] worry calcified into something colder.
[28:14] The New York Police Department logged the report and began the
[28:18] standard process for a missing adult in 2001.
[28:22] That meant Flyers, hospital checks, morgue checks and a
[28:27] public appeal asking anyone who'd seen a slim young man on a
[28:30] green bike to come forward. By the middle of June, the New
[28:35] York Daily News had run a piece on the missing prodigy, complete
[28:39] with a photograph and an appeal from his parents.
[28:44] What happened over the next several weeks is, in hindsight,
[28:48] one of the strangest parts of the case.
[28:51] The police searched, and so did the family.
[28:54] Detectives checked every emergency room within reach of
[28:57] Brooklyn for an unidentified patient matching his
[28:59] description. They contacted morgues across
[29:03] the five boroughs and beyond, circulated his picture through
[29:06] the city's missing person system and worked with reporters to
[29:10] keep the story alive. His parents, frightened by what
[29:14] they understood about his state of mind, told investigators
[29:18] openly that they feared he may have done something to himself.
[29:23] If that's what happened, the city should have produced a
[29:26] body. New York is densely populated,
[29:30] heavily policed, and even in 2001 it had no shortage of
[29:35] cameras and potential witnesses. People in crisis do tend to be
[29:39] found eventually, even when they don't want to be.
[29:43] But here there was simply nothing at all.
[29:46] The bike never turned up chain to a railing on the Brooklyn
[29:49] shoreline, and the parks, beaches and quiet industrial
[29:54] corners where a young man might choose to disappear all came up
[29:58] empty. Weeks turned into months.
[30:02] The case stayed open but inactive as the summer of 2001
[30:06] rolled on. Then in September, the city was
[30:09] hit by an event that swallowed almost every other missing
[30:12] person story in New York Hole. Any chance Alexander's face
[30:17] might have gotten national attention vanished with the
[30:20] towers in September of that year.
[30:24] The mathematical community, which is smaller than people
[30:27] imagine, quietly grieved a prodigy it had assumed would
[30:31] still be solving problems decades later.
[30:34] The Penn State algebra group preserved his page on a faculty
[30:38] server, where the black and white photograph of him biking
[30:42] is still up till this day. The uncomfortable truth is that
[30:47] almost everything about the final hours of June 10th is
[30:50] unknown, other than the fact he left his house with his bike.
[30:54] We don't know whether the note was sincere or a deflection, or
[30:58] whether he actually went to any library that day.
[31:01] Many believe that Alexander unfortunately lost his struggle
[31:04] with mental illness, and that remains the leading theory of
[31:08] the case. Some have questioned whether the
[31:11] extreme pressure and expectations that were placed on
[31:14] Alexander from his earliest days was appropriate.
[31:18] It's hard to imagine the feeling of being told you have the
[31:21] ability to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all
[31:24] time. It's possible that Alexander
[31:27] simply didn't feel that he could live up to the expectations that
[31:30] society had placed upon him. After all, he was being compared
[31:35] to people who were so prolific that they have Wikipedia pages
[31:39] dedicated to the mathematical concepts they pioneered.
[31:44] Personally, this is the theory I prefer as well, and I imagine
[31:49] that his bicycle never turned up simply because it was left
[31:52] unattended somewhere in New York City after it came out that
[31:56] Alexander was missing and endangered.
[31:59] I imagine whoever took the bike simply stowed it away to avoid
[32:02] any potential serious criminal suspicion.
[32:07] Others wonder if he met with foul play, which is something
[32:10] that isn't talked about enough when people experience mental
[32:13] breakdowns. People experiencing psychotic
[32:17] episodes often place themselves in very dangerous situations,
[32:22] acting in ways they wouldn't usually act.
[32:26] That said, there's simply no evidence that this happened in
[32:29] this case, and despite him being off his medication, his parents
[32:34] didn't report any particular manic behavior.
[32:38] His parents had already experienced his manic episodes
[32:40] before, so they were certainly likely to be aware of the signs.
[32:46] There is of course the theory that he deliberately chose to
[32:49] disappear and to shed the pressure that came with the
[32:52] entire mathematical world viewing him as a genius.
[32:57] While this was given some weight early on, as time has passed
[33:01] this has become far more unlikely.
[33:07] In 1968, a young Japanese folk singer walked into a midtown
[33:11] Manhattan studio alongside one of the most powerful producers
[33:15] in popular music. He cut a sprawling double album
[33:19] that fused acid rock guitars with whispered Tokyo memories
[33:23] and pressed it onto vinyl. He then vanished so completely
[33:27] that more than half a century later, it's unclear whether the
[33:31] name printed on the sleeve was even his to begin with.
[33:36] The record's just called Harumi. It came out on Verve Forecast in
[33:41] late 1968, a label then known for its appetite for the strange
[33:46] and the literary. The man behind the boards was
[33:50] Tom Wilson, the producer who'd plugged Bob Dylan into
[33:54] electricity and helped finish the first Velvet Underground LP.
[33:59] By the time he pulled Harumi into a studio, Wilson had
[34:02] already redrawn the shape of American Music more than once.
[34:07] So when he picked this unknown young man as one of his next
[34:10] signings, it meant something. It suggested somebody important,
[34:15] thought Harumi was the next big thing.
[34:18] The album itself is unlike almost anything else from that
[34:22] era. The first half holds tightly
[34:24] composed pop and folk songs, delivered in a soft, lightly
[34:29] accented voice that drifts between English and Japanese.
[34:33] The second-half belongs to two extended pieces, sprawling
[34:37] psychedelic odysseys of distorted guitars, sitar drones
[34:42] and spoken reminiscences about old friends back in Tokyo.
[34:47] For reasons that aren't quite clear, these last two songs are
[34:51] listed but aren't available on Spotify, but they can be heard
[34:54] on YouTube. Still, almost nothing concrete
[34:58] survives about Harumi the person beyond what was included in the
[35:01] album material itself. The liner notes claim his name
[35:05] was Harumi Ando, that he was born in Tokyo, and that he was
[35:10] in his late 20s when the record came out.
[35:13] They place his discovery in Greenwich Village, where Wilson
[35:16] reportedly heard him playing in a small folk club and decided he
[35:20] had to record him. Beyond that, the trail goes cold
[35:25] almost immediately, and there are no surviving interviews, no
[35:30] concert footage and no photographs beyond the album
[35:33] itself. Some accounts suggest he'd
[35:36] arrived in the States in the mid 1960s and drifted between Boston
[35:40] and New York, working the coffee house circuit.
[35:44] Others insist he was already a known quantity inside Japanese
[35:47] folk circles before he crossed the Pacific.
[35:51] Both stories have been repeated for decades, and neither has
[35:54] been backed up with primary documentation.
[35:57] Further, the latter claim that he was well known in Japan has
[36:01] shattered under the weight of the Internet.
[36:04] In the 60s or 70s, it was easy to claim that he was well known
[36:08] in Japan, but with hindsight, unless he operated there under a
[36:13] different name, this wasn't the case.
[36:16] We can't even confirm with certainty that Harumi Ando was
[36:20] the name he was born under. Music historians have come to
[36:24] believe that this may not have been his birth name, since
[36:27] Harumi is a common woman's name. That said, it's in the same
[36:32] realm of names like Ashley or Kelly, where the name is simply
[36:36] overwhelmingly female in nature, but not necessarily inherently
[36:40] feminine. Here's where the mystery
[36:43] hardens. After the album was pressed and
[36:47] released, Harumi just stopped. He didn't release a second
[36:51] record, and as far as we can ascertain, he didn't actually
[36:54] tour anywhere. There's evidence to indicate
[36:58] that a planned America Wide tour was scheduled, but no one
[37:02] recalls having actually attended one of these shows.
[37:05] He didn't fade gradually into session work, and he didn't
[37:09] surface later in some quieter side project.
[37:13] He was there, and then he wasn't For Forecast.
[37:17] For its part, itself got absorbed into a larger company.
[37:21] Within a couple of years, whatever paperwork might have
[37:24] tied Harumi to a real person, a real address or a real bank
[37:29] account, got swallowed by the corporate shuffle.
[37:33] By the early 1970s, even people inside the industry who'd worked
[37:37] on the album weren't sure where he'd gone.
[37:41] For decades, the record drifted in obscurity, and original
[37:44] copies became collector's items traded among record enthusiasts
[37:49] and curious crate diggers. When a small label reissued the
[37:53] album in the mid 2000s, journalists and super fans tried
[37:57] again to track him down. They contacted old label mates,
[38:02] surviving session players, musicologists, and Japanese
[38:07] music historians. They chased phone tips,
[38:10] unconfirmed sightings, and rumors of a quiet life lived
[38:14] under another name following leads back to Japan itself.
[38:18] Most of those threads dead ended or came back with vague second
[38:22] hand recollections. A few people remembered meeting
[38:26] someone called Harumi briefly in the late 60s, but nobody could
[38:30] say what became of him afterward.
[38:33] Perhaps the most interesting lead was a newspaper article
[38:35] from 2006, which mentioned that a photographer called Harumi
[38:40] Ando lived in an apartment since 1975.
[38:44] Unfortunately, that was all there.
[38:45] Was there a throwaway line indicating that someone named
[38:49] Harumi was there and that this person was a former professional
[38:53] photographer. Notably, the article doesn't
[38:57] specify whether the Harumi mentioned in this context is a
[39:01] man or a woman. Further, despite the
[39:04] identification of this Harumi as a professional photographer,
[39:08] there seems to be a notable absence of any known photographs
[39:11] by this individual. Assuming that the Harumi Ando
[39:16] mentioned in that article isn't the same person, there are a
[39:19] number of other theories that have floated about the likeliest
[39:23] explanation's also the most ordinary.
[39:26] He probably went home, and if Harumi was a professional name
[39:31] rather than a personal one, this would make him hard to track.
[39:36] Plenty of international artists who passed through New York in
[39:39] that era simply returned to their home countries when the
[39:43] dream didn't pay the rent. Harumi may well have been one of
[39:47] them, slipping back into Japanese civilian life under a
[39:50] different name. A small fringe of fans prefers
[39:54] darker theories, whispering about overdoses, breakdowns, or
[39:59] even foul play, though nothing along those lines has ever been
[40:03] substantiated. Anyway, not to turn this into a
[40:07] music review channel, but I recommend checking out the album
[40:10] if you're even slightly into rock music.

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