# Two Cases So Disturbing… They Still Don’t Make Sense | 206

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 18 Apr 2026, 39 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO2841648781.mp3

Join me for 2 chilling cases that are too dark for Netflix. Episode 206 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, Al Kite, Colorado, UK true crime

## Transcript

[0:00] By the time the Aurora police forced their way into a quiet
[0:03] townhouse on the afternoon of May 24th, 2004, the man
[0:08] responsible for the unspeakable acts inside had already been
[0:11] gone. For at least a day.
[0:13] He'd slept in the owner's bed. He'd eaten food from the owner's
[0:17] kitchen. He'd taken a long shower to
[0:19] clean up before dumping bleach down the drain.
[0:23] He'd wiped all the surfaces he'd touched.
[0:25] And then, with no particular urgency, he drove the owner's
[0:30] pickup truck to a bank machine where he'd withdrawn exactly
[0:33] $1000. He then left the vehicle parked
[0:37] a block and a half away. That had been Sunday morning.
[0:41] Now it was Monday, and Albert Kite, 53 years old, had been
[0:47] dead in his own basement since the weekend before.
[0:51] Nobody knew who the man who did this horrific act was.
[0:54] And more than 20 years on, detectives are no closer to
[0:58] cracking this horrific unsolved true crime mystery.
[1:02] Al Kite had been born in the spring of 1951, and he had, by
[1:07] every account, built the sort of life that ought to have ended in
[1:10] a rocking chair on a porch somewhere.
[1:12] A few decades later, he was a project manager at a consulting
[1:16] and engineering firm in Denver, and his Co workers thought of
[1:20] him as steady, reliable and low drama.
[1:24] He was divorced about 3 years out of it by that May, and he
[1:29] was seeing a woman named Linda. He had a two-story townhouse in
[1:34] a suburban corner of Aurora, Co, the kind of neighborhood where
[1:38] most weekends play out quietly and crime wasn't on anyone's
[1:42] mind. The picture that emerges from
[1:45] interviews with the people who loved him is almost relentlessly
[1:49] gentle. Al was polite to strangers, and
[1:53] he did favors without being asked.
[1:55] He kept his yard up, paid his bills on time, and called his
[1:59] sister often. His girlfriend, Linda, who had
[2:03] known him only a relatively short while by that spring,
[2:06] would go on to describe him as warm, unguarded, and a little
[2:11] shy. He wasn't a man with enemies,
[2:16] and that's the piece the detectives have never been able
[2:18] to get past. Despite this fact, someone had
[2:22] chosen him, perhaps specifically, and had come to
[2:25] his house with a plan for complete annihilation to make
[2:29] use of the basement suite in his townhouse and pick up a little
[2:33] extra income. Al had been running a rental ad.
[2:36] There was a listing online, and there was reportedly ads running
[2:40] in a local paper as well, as was the style at the time.
[2:45] Sometime around the middle of May 2004, he got a call from a
[2:50] man who introduced himself as Robert Cooper.
[2:53] Cooper said he'd just moved out from the East Coast.
[2:56] He said he was starting a new position at Wells Fargo, and he
[2:59] said he needed a soft landing while he got settled.
[3:03] He was calm on the phone, and he showed up in person in a suit,
[3:06] which stuck out a little in AL's memory, though not enough to put
[3:10] him off. He thought he was just a bit
[3:13] formal. Cooper walked the basement,
[3:16] liked what he saw, and Al produced a rental application
[3:20] that Cooper filled out with the confidence of a man who'd done
[3:23] this kind of paperwork many times before.
[3:27] But here's the thing. None of what Robert Cooper wrote
[3:31] down was even remotely true. The address he put on the form
[3:37] when investigators later chased it down turned out to be an
[3:40] administrative building on the University of Colorado Medical
[3:44] Campus. The Social Security number
[3:47] belonged to a woman living somewhere else in the country
[3:50] who'd never heard of him. His alleged employer didn't know
[3:54] he existed, and his references were all invented from whole
[3:57] cloth. There was no Robert Cooper, at
[4:01] least not on any paper, anywhere.
[4:03] The only real things about him were the face a handful of
[4:06] witnesses would remember, and eventually a single drop of
[4:10] blood. Those witnesses described a
[4:13] white male, probably in his late 30s or early 40s, though some
[4:18] put him closer to his early 50s. He was around 5 foot 8 to 5 foot
[4:22] 10, solidly built, roughly 175 lbs, with dark, slightly curly
[4:30] hair. He walked with a limp and
[4:34] sometimes used a cane, but other times he didn't, indicating that
[4:38] this was all part of his persona.
[4:41] It also makes me wonder if he was something of a film buff, or
[4:45] if he was perhaps a fan of the movie The Usual Suspects.
[4:49] Some of the people who crossed his path that month thought his
[4:53] accent was faintly off, as though he'd grown up somewhere
[4:56] in Eastern Europe. Romanian was the guest that came
[5:00] up most often, but others heard a plain old standard American
[5:04] accent. His mannerisms shifted from one
[5:08] encounter to the next. A different gate, a different
[5:11] cadence, different clothes. It's hard to tell in retrospect
[5:17] whether witnesses were seeing a single man who was good at
[5:19] shifting his personas or simply remembering the same person
[5:23] inconsistently. What is clear is that Cooper had
[5:28] been working at this for a while.
[5:30] Investigators would later trace a prepaid cell phone he'd
[5:34] purchased in the general area of the medical campus.
[5:37] That burner had been used to call a long list of rental
[5:40] listings around the Denver area, and AL's ad was one of several
[5:45] he'd responded to. He toured other properties,
[5:48] walked the rooms, eyed the windows and then politely
[5:52] declined. For reasons nobody can fully
[5:55] explain, Al Kite's basement was the one he came back to.
[6:00] Whatever his process was, it wasn't the process of a man in a
[6:04] hurry by any means. Some of the landlords in that
[6:07] window remembered later that there'd been nothing overtly
[6:10] wrong with him. He showed up on time, he'd been
[6:14] dressed well, and he'd asked reasonable questions.
[6:18] And yet the common thread in their memories was a kind of
[6:20] quiet unease, the sense that something, though they couldn't
[6:25] articulate what, wasn't quite right with the mysterious Mr.
[6:29] Cooper. On Saturday, May 22nd, Al was
[6:34] confirmed to be alive and in good spirits at 3:30 in the
[6:37] afternoon. His girlfriend, Linda had flown
[6:40] out of Denver earlier that day for a personal trip, and she
[6:43] called him from the airport around that time.
[6:47] The conversation was short and ordinary.
[6:50] She talked about the flight and he talked about the weekend
[6:53] ahead, and that was the last contact between them.
[6:57] Somewhere on that same Saturday, Robert Cooper came back to the
[7:01] townhouse on South Helena Street.
[7:04] He may have had an appointment, or he may have arrived
[7:07] unannounced, since investigators have never been able to
[7:09] reconstruct that moment with certainty.
[7:13] However, what they have been able to reconstruct is that Al
[7:16] seems to have let him in willingly and then for some
[7:20] reason let him down the basement stairs.
[7:24] Maybe Cooper had asked to see something.
[7:26] A fuse box, a water heater, a piece of furniture that was
[7:30] going to be included with the unit.
[7:33] Whatever the pretext, Al went down the stairs 1st and Cooper
[7:37] went down second, A mistake that would be fateful.
[7:42] As they were descending, Cooper struck Al on the back of the
[7:45] head, and while it isn't clear if this was meant to finish him
[7:48] off, for the reasons, you'll see Cooper likely intentionally held
[7:53] back. The blow didn't take his life,
[7:56] probably as planned, but it disoriented him badly enough
[8:00] that Cooper could overpower him easily.
[8:03] The intruder had come prepared, carrying some cords and a truly
[8:07] disturbed plan for what to do with them.
[8:11] Now, I'll be repeating this a couple times over the next
[8:13] minute or two, but I'm going to try to only give an overview of
[8:17] what was done here without getting into the specifics.
[8:20] And while you can go and look up all the details yourself, I can
[8:24] say with absolute certainty that you'll be a happier and more
[8:28] fulfilled person for not having done so.
[8:32] Cooper bound AL's hands behind his back, and he bound his
[8:36] ankles. Then he tied the ankles back to
[8:39] the wrist ligatures. Al was effectively folded into a
[8:42] hog tie on the basement floor. And then Cooper began doing what
[8:47] he'd apparently arrived to do. The details are grim.
[8:51] They don't need to be described at length to be understood.
[8:55] But what can be said is that Al suffered for hours before
[8:58] passing away, and I'll mostly leave it at that.
[9:02] Except there's one specific detail of what Al was put
[9:06] through that needs to be underlined pretty heavily,
[9:09] because it's a significant clue about the identity of the
[9:12] attacker. He'd been beaten on the soles of
[9:15] his feet, which, turns out, is a very specific form of punishment
[9:20] that has a long history in parts of the Middle East and
[9:23] Southeastern Europe. By the time it was over, hours
[9:28] had passed, and then Cooper, instead of leaving, decided to
[9:33] make himself at home. This is one of the parts of the
[9:36] story that's kept investigators and profilers circling back for
[9:40] more than two decades, because it says something particular
[9:44] about the kind of person they're hunting.
[9:46] Most people who do something like what Cooper did to Al Kite
[9:49] flee the scene in a panic. They want as much ground between
[9:53] themselves and the house as they can get, and they want it as
[9:56] fast as possible. Cooper, for his part, went
[10:00] upstairs. He ate food from AL's kitchen.
[10:04] He took a shower in the master bathroom.
[10:06] He slept in AL's bed. He wore pieces of AL's clothing.
[10:11] He handled the owner's possessions calmly and without
[10:14] haste. And at some point in the early
[10:16] hours of Sunday morning, he began to clean.
[10:20] The cleaning was methodical enough to suggest it had been
[10:23] planned well before any of it started.
[10:27] Cooper filled the kitchen sink with Clorox bleach and dropped
[10:30] between 6:00 and 12:00, kitchen knives into it.
[10:34] He also dropped in the drinking glass he'd used, a pen, a small
[10:38] cleaning scrubber, and AL's car keys.
[10:42] He poured more bleach down the shower drain, where he had
[10:44] calmly washed himself after the events.
[10:47] He wiped down every surface he could think of, missing almost
[10:51] nothing whatsoever. He collected the rental
[10:54] application he'd filled out, the one with the fabricated identity
[10:59] and carried it out with him when he eventually left.
[11:03] He moved through that townhouse the way a professional might
[11:06] move through a work site at the end of a long day.
[11:10] Early on Sunday morning, May 23rd, he drove AL's pickup truck
[11:15] to a nearby Wells Fargo branch where he used a drive through
[11:18] bank machine. He was wearing a ski mask,
[11:21] gloves and a jacket. The cameras caught him anyway,
[11:26] though the mask covered everything below the upper
[11:28] cheeks. He used AL's debit card and
[11:31] withdrew exactly $1000, even though the account had more in
[11:35] it than that. Then he drove the truck back
[11:38] toward the townhouse, parked it roughly a block and a half down
[11:42] the road, and walked away. No fingerprints were left in the
[11:47] cab, and the ATM receipt was left on the front seat, like a
[11:51] receipt somebody might leave for a friend after borrowing their
[11:54] car. I should mention here that this
[11:57] is the man we believe to be Robert Cooper who was captured
[12:00] on the surveillance video. But it's a distinct possibility
[12:04] that this was actually an accomplice, perhaps someone sent
[12:08] in to muddy the waters of the investigation.
[12:11] That's just my own personal theory.
[12:13] There's no evidence to support it.
[12:15] But absolutely nothing about this case would shock me.
[12:20] For about 36 hours, the house on South Helena Street held its
[12:24] secret, and Linda tried to reach out on Sunday and couldn't.
[12:29] She didn't want to assume the worst right away, and they
[12:31] hadn't been together all that long.
[12:34] There were plenty of ordinary explanations for why he may not
[12:37] have answered. He was outside, he was out on an
[12:41] errand, or perhaps he was in the middle of some project he hadn't
[12:44] mentioned. He may have even had a work
[12:47] emergency come up and maybe he had to go into the office to
[12:51] handle some business on a Sunday.
[12:54] On Monday morning, May 24th, Al didn't show up at the Denver
[12:58] firm where he worked and he hadn't called in.
[13:02] That was deeply out of character for him and his Co workers tried
[13:05] his home phone, they tried his cell, and when the calls kept
[13:10] going unanswered, they contacted the Aurora Police Department.
[13:15] Officers arrived at the house in the afternoon to perform a
[13:18] welfare check and the outside looked ordinary.
[13:22] The front door was locked, the curtains drawn, and they cleared
[13:26] the main floor first. The kitchen smelled strongly of
[13:29] bleach, and the sink full of submerged implements struck them
[13:33] as slightly unusual but not too far out of the ordinary.
[13:38] The bedroom was made-up but looked faintly disturbed, and
[13:41] the bathroom, too, had the sharp chemical smell of a place that
[13:45] had been heavily cleaned. Then they went to the basement.
[13:50] The lead investigator assigned to the case was a career Aurora
[13:53] detective named Tom Sabieski. He'd spent many years in the
[13:58] job, and he would say later on the record that what he saw at
[14:02] the bottom of those basement stairs was the worst thing he
[14:05] saw in his entire career. For a cop who'd been at it that
[14:09] long, that isn't a small thing to say.
[14:13] A coroner's team, crime scene technicians and federal agents
[14:17] joined the response over the next several hours, and the work
[14:21] of reconstructing what happened began.
[14:24] They would find an almost perfectly cleaned crime scene.
[14:28] But almost perfect and perfect are two distinctly different
[14:31] things. Cooper had thought about almost
[14:35] everything. He'd chosen a target who was
[14:38] advertising publicly. He'd built a tower of false
[14:42] identity that folded back on itself at every step.
[14:45] A fictitious employer, a stranger's Social Security
[14:48] number, a fake address, a burner phone.
[14:52] Everything. He'd stayed in the home for
[14:54] hours after committing this series of disturbing acts to
[14:58] scrub the scene on his own schedule.
[15:00] He'd taken the truck to a bank machine and a mask and gloves
[15:04] and left the receipt in the cab. As if to underline how little
[15:07] leverage the evidence would offer or to send some unknown
[15:10] message. He'd dumped 2 cell phones
[15:13] afterward, the burner he'd used for the calls and AL's own phone
[15:18] in a fairly rough area of downtown Denver.
[15:21] He purposely dropped them in places where the phones would be
[15:24] picked up and handled before they were retrieved.
[15:28] What he missed was a single drop of blood on the basement stairs,
[15:32] and fortunately for investigators, it wasn't AL's
[15:37] genetic testing later established that the drop
[15:39] belonged to an unknown man, presumably Cooper himself.
[15:44] That drop sat on the stair through the cleaning, somehow
[15:47] outlasting every other piece of physical evidence at the scene.
[15:52] And in the years since, it's been effectively the only piece
[15:55] of physical evidence from Robert Cooper's person that anyone
[15:59] associated with the investigation has ever actually
[16:02] held. In the weeks that followed,
[16:06] Aurora detectives and the FBI began working a handful of
[16:09] parallel threads. They pulled the burner phone
[16:12] records and worked the call log to find every landlord he had
[16:15] gone to see. They chased the rental
[16:18] application to its fake address at the University of Colorado to
[16:21] see if anyone recognized the man.
[16:24] But there they came up, completely empty.
[16:27] They cross referenced the description against Wells
[16:29] Fargo's actual new hire lists, which as expected, turned up no
[16:35] Robert Cooper. But the real breakthrough came
[16:38] from their work tracking down the landlords who had spoken
[16:41] with the mysterious man. One recalled Cooper examining
[16:45] the windows of a rental unit with an unusual level of
[16:48] attention. Another remembered him as being
[16:52] still and almost lifeless in a way that was hard to describe.
[16:57] A third said simply that she hadn't wanted to be alone with
[17:00] him in the house due to the uneasy feelings he gave her.
[17:04] Now I do have to mention the inherent weakness associated
[17:07] with these police interviews of the landlords.
[17:11] The landlords knew a truly horrific crime had been
[17:13] committed by this so-called Robert Cooper, which would make
[17:17] any previous interactions seem disconcerting in retrospect, but
[17:21] I digress. Investigators also noticed that
[17:26] on at least a couple of occasions Cooper had gone to
[17:29] some trouble to avoid being seen by Linda.
[17:32] Al had mentioned her, and Cooper had adjusted his timing so that
[17:37] when she was likely to be around, he wasn't.
[17:41] Whether that was because he feared being identified by a
[17:44] witness later or because there was some other reason is
[17:48] something that has eluded detectives.
[17:51] Despite this case having long gone cold, and despite there
[17:55] being few meaningful leads, the drop of blood and foot beating
[17:59] technique have done outsized work.
[18:02] In the late 2000s, a private lab in Virginia ran the sample
[18:07] through phenotyping tools that infer likely physical traits
[18:11] from genetic markers. The result pointed to a man with
[18:15] Eastern European ancestry, with roots plausibly traceable to
[18:19] Romania, Bulgaria or a neighboring country that lined
[18:25] up with the faint Eastern European accent At least one
[18:28] witness had reported hearing back in 2004.
[18:32] A composite image based on the genetic work was eventually
[18:36] released publicly, hoping to shake something loose, but as of
[18:40] yet, this hasn't led to a break in the case.
[18:44] Genetic genealogy has been applied to the sample as well,
[18:48] though the fact that the man may not have any close relatives in
[18:51] the United States could be a complicating factor.
[18:55] If he's from Europe, where there are different privacy laws at
[18:59] play with respect to genetic genealogy, it may be difficult
[19:04] to trace him. Another factor is that genetic
[19:08] testing simply isn't as popular in countries that aren't largely
[19:11] populated by the descendants of immigrants.
[19:15] The simple reason for this being that most people in Romania or
[19:18] Bulgaria, for instance, know their ancestry.
[19:22] And if they were from an ethnic community in those countries,
[19:25] perhaps like a Transylvanian German, they'd be well aware of
[19:28] that as well. They're simply not the same
[19:31] incentive to submit to a highly invasive genetic process for
[19:35] people from these countries. As for why the man known as
[19:40] Robert Cooper did this to Al, there's honestly as many
[19:43] theories out there as there are people who have heard the story.
[19:47] There are some tenuous connections to other landlords
[19:50] that were attacked in a vaguely similar way, which has suggested
[19:54] to some that the intruder was a serial predator.
[19:57] However, no connections have ever been meaningfully
[20:00] confirmed, and something about the brutality of this case is
[20:03] just markedly different. Given the quite unspeakable acts
[20:08] he committed against Al, I suspect the truth about who
[20:11] Robert Cooper actually was is even darker than we'd suspect.
[20:17] The case of Alkyte is one of the most disturbing I've ever
[20:20] covered, and it's one that I'm hoping we see a resolution to in
[20:24] the near future. Robert Cooper, whoever he really
[20:27] was, would be somewhere in his 60s or 70s by now, if he's alive
[20:32] at all. He may be living quietly under
[20:35] another name in another town. He could be your neighbor, or he
[20:40] could be mine. Or perhaps he was already on a
[20:43] flight by the time the police discovered AL's body, never to
[20:47] return to North America again. Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here
[20:54] asking you to hit the subscription button and the
[20:56] notification bell and turn on all notifications.
[21:00] Also, don't forget to share this video with your friends and
[21:02] family or link it on your social media accounts since that really
[21:06] helps my channel grow. On the afternoon of June 11th,
[21:13] 1980, a man climbed to the top of a coal pile in Todd Morden,
[21:17] West Yorkshire, and found a body lying face up on the black
[21:21] stones. The man was middle-aged, dressed
[21:24] in a suit and missing his shirt. His wallet and watch were gone,
[21:29] his wedding ring absent from his finger, and his hair had been
[21:33] cropped short in a way that didn't match how he'd looked a
[21:37] few days earlier. Strangest of all, despite having
[21:41] apparently spent some time lying on a slope of loose coal roughly
[21:46] 10 to 12 feet high, there wasn't a smudge of coal dust on him
[21:50] anywhere. No black streaks on the pants,
[21:53] no dirt under the fingernails, no disturbance in the pile
[21:57] beneath him, as if he'd been placed on the summit by
[22:01] something that never actually touched the coal.
[22:04] The man on the pile was Zygmund Adamski, a 56 year old Polish
[22:09] born miner who'd last been seen by his wife five days earlier
[22:13] walking down the street to the local grocery store.
[22:17] The last thing anyone could say with any certainty was that he'd
[22:21] been in good health, sober, and on his way to pick up a few
[22:24] groceries before the family attended a wedding the next day.
[22:29] Five days after that errand, 20 miles from where he'd last been
[22:33] spotted, he was gone. And let's just say some people
[22:37] think this isn't your usual true crime style abduction case.
[22:41] Many people believe that Adamski was abducted either by forces
[22:45] from outside this world or by shadowy intelligence agencies
[22:49] from the Eastern Bloc. Adamski was born in Poland in
[22:53] August of 1923 and came to Britain in the 1940s, where he
[22:58] eventually built a life for himself in the mining country of
[23:01] West Yorkshire. Britain took in a large
[23:04] population of Polish servicemen and civilians who'd ended up on
[23:08] the wrong side of the Iron Curtain when the fighting
[23:11] stopped, many of them, despite having fought for their country,
[23:16] had no realistic prospect of returning to their homeland
[23:20] without facing persecution. By 1980, Adamski was living with
[23:26] his wife, Lottie, at a modest house on Thornfield Crescent in
[23:29] Tingley, a small village sandwiched between Leeds and
[23:33] Wakefield. She'd been suffering from
[23:35] multiple sclerosis for years by that point, which meant
[23:39] Adamski's domestic life was organized around her care as
[23:42] much as around his own routine. He was, by every account that
[23:47] survives, unremarkable in the best possible sense.
[23:51] Friends called him Ziggy, and neighbors described him as
[23:55] steady, polite and fond of tending his garden.
[23:59] He and Lottie had been married for decades, and although the
[24:03] couple didn't have children of their own, Adamski was close to
[24:06] his extended family. On the afternoon of June 6th,
[24:11] 1980, Adamski told Lottie he was going to shop for potatoes,
[24:16] which tracks because, honestly, Polish people absolutely love
[24:19] their potatoes. He put on a jacket, stepped
[24:23] through the front door sometime around 3:30 and turned onto the
[24:27] road that led into the village. According to accounts, he
[24:32] stopped briefly on the way to greet a neighbor, exchanged a
[24:35] few words and carried on walking.
[24:39] That was the last confirmed sighting anyone would have of
[24:42] him. He didn't come back that
[24:44] evening. By nightfall, Lottie was pacing
[24:47] the house, and by the time the hour grew late, she'd called the
[24:51] police. Her initial fear wasn't illness
[24:54] or confusion or an accident on the road.
[24:57] She reportedly told officers that she suspected he'd been
[25:00] abducted. Why she jumped to that
[25:02] conclusion so quickly has never been fully explained in the
[25:06] public record, but it's worth sitting with for a moment.
[25:10] A woman whose husband had lived in Britain for decades in a
[25:14] quiet village where nothing much ever happened, immediately
[25:18] assumed the worst possible scenario.
[25:21] Whatever she knew about her husband or feared about the
[25:24] world he moved through, she wasn't treating this as a case
[25:28] of a middle-aged man wandering off to clear his head.
[25:32] West Yorkshire Police opened an investigation, but they came up
[25:36] with absolutely nothing for four full days.
[25:40] Adamski had effectively stepped off the edge of the map.
[25:44] On June 11th, 5 days after Adamski walked out for those
[25:47] potatoes, a man named Trevor Parker climbed up a pile of coal
[25:52] at his father's yard near the train station in Todd Morden.
[25:56] Todd Morden sits in the Calder Valley, on the border between
[25:59] Yorkshire and Lancashire, about 20 miles West of Tingley.
[26:04] It's a milltown tucked between steep green hills, notable for
[26:08] very little in 1980, except that within months it would become
[26:13] one of the most heavily documented UFO hotspots in
[26:16] British history. But on that particular
[26:19] afternoon, in the fading warmth of early June, Parker was just
[26:24] doing his job. Shortly before 4:00 in the
[26:27] afternoon, he spotted something on the peak of the pile that
[26:31] didn't belong. When he got close enough to make
[26:34] out what he was looking at, he found Adamski, his eyes open and
[26:39] his face set in what witnesses at the scene would later
[26:42] describe as an expression of terror.
[26:46] Parker called the police, and a constable named Alan Godfrey
[26:50] arrived and became the first officer to examine the body.
[26:55] And trust me, you're going to want to remember this officer's
[26:57] name because he'll play a big role in the more unusual
[27:01] developments. In this case, what Constable
[27:04] Godfrey found was a body laying on the loose coal near the top
[27:07] of the heap. And Simply put, nothing about
[27:10] the scene made rational sense. The pile sloped sharply on all
[27:14] sides, the kind of surface a living person can't climb
[27:17] without shifting the stones and leaving tracks behind them.
[27:21] But there were no tracks, and there were no scuffs in the
[27:25] coal. There were no footprints leading
[27:27] up or down, no sign of any person or vehicle having
[27:31] approached the pile recently, and no disturbance in the
[27:35] material beneath or around the body.
[27:38] Adamski hadn't climbed up under his own power, and nobody had
[27:42] carried him up there in any ordinary way.
[27:45] That left an ordinary mark. The details didn't stop being
[27:50] strange once the body was moved to the Mortuary.
[27:53] Adamski was wearing the suit he'd left home in, but his shirt
[27:57] was gone. His wallet, his watch, and his
[28:00] wedding ring we're all missing. His shoes were tied correctly,
[28:05] but his pants and jacket were fastened wrong, as though
[28:08] someone unfamiliar with his particular clothing had dressed
[28:11] him again in a hurry. His hair, which had been worn
[28:15] longer when he'd left home, had been cut short and roughly, as
[28:20] if someone had taken a pair of blunt shears to it and hadn't
[28:24] cared how the result looked. Despite having been missing for
[28:28] five days, he'd only grown about one day's worth of stubble,
[28:31] suggesting he or someone else had shaved his face.
[28:34] His skin was largely clean, and there was no coal dust on him
[28:37] anywhere. Not on the suit, not in his
[28:40] hair, not under his nails. Adamski had a series of burn
[28:45] marks across the back of his neck and the tops of his
[28:48] shoulders, with smaller marks on his head.
[28:53] The burns didn't look fresh, and a forensic examination estimated
[28:57] that they were roughly 48 hours old at the time of death.
[29:02] This means whatever process caused them had happened a full
[29:05] 2 days before he ended up in the yard.
[29:08] Covering those burns was a substance no one could identify,
[29:12] a greasy ointment or gel that had been spread across the
[29:15] wounds in a way that strongly suggested someone had tried to
[29:19] treat them. Samples of the ointment were
[29:22] sent to the Home Office forensic laboratory, but the results came
[29:26] back inconclusive. The substance didn't match any
[29:30] standard burn treatment available in a pharmacy, any
[29:33] industrial chemical the lab had on file, or any common household
[29:38] preparation anyone could think of.
[29:41] The post mortem was carried out by Doctor Alan Edwards, a
[29:44] pathologist at the Royal Halifax Infirmary.
[29:48] Edwards determined that Adamski had perished sometime between
[29:51] 11:00 in the morning and 1:00 in the afternoon on June 11th.
[29:56] This placed his death within hours of the body being found on
[29:59] the heap, and the official medical cause was listed as a
[30:02] heart attack. There was no trauma consistent
[30:06] with a beating, no wounds that could account for his sudden
[30:09] passing and no signs of starvation or dehydration during
[30:14] those missing days. The inquest was presided over by
[30:18] the West Yorkshire coroner, James Turnbull.
[30:21] Turnbull took the case seriously and he heard from the
[30:24] pathologist, from Constable Godfrey, from Ladi Adamski, from
[30:30] the Coal Yard staff and from forensic experts who'd examined
[30:34] him. After several months of
[30:36] deliberation, he returned an open verdict, which was
[30:40] essentially a formal acknowledgement that while he
[30:43] died from a heart attack, the circumstances were unexplained.
[30:48] Turnbull would later tell journalists that the Adamski
[30:50] case was the single strangest matter he'd encountered in his
[30:54] career. He said the question of where
[30:57] the man had been during those five days and what had been done
[31:00] to him while he was missing was a question he simply couldn't
[31:04] answer with any confidence. The case might have faded into
[31:10] the footnotes of British missing persons history if it had ended
[31:14] at the inquest. But about 5 months after
[31:17] Adamski's body was found, the officer who'd examined him at
[31:20] the coal yard had an experience of his own that dragged the
[31:24] whole story into another dimension entirely.
[31:28] On the morning of November 28th, 1980, Alan Godfrey was on duty
[31:33] and Todd Morden driving alone in a marked police vehicle.
[31:37] Shortly after five in the morning.
[31:40] He was reportedly looking for a small herd of cows that had been
[31:43] reported loose from a farm, the kind of errand rural officers in
[31:48] the North of England get pulled into on quiet shifts.
[31:52] What he said he saw instead was a large diamond shaped object
[31:57] hovering above Burnley Road ahead of him, rotating slowly,
[32:02] glowing and sitting roughly 5 feet off the road.
[32:06] He initially thought it was a bus, but when he got closer he
[32:11] realized the object didn't have wheels.
[32:15] Godfrey attempted to radio in the sighting, but his car radio
[32:18] and his personal handset both failed.
[32:21] He reached for his clipboard to sketch the object, and according
[32:25] to his own account, the next thing he was aware of was
[32:28] driving his vehicle further down the road.
[32:31] He had absolutely no memory of how he traveled that stretch,
[32:35] nor what period of time had passed.
[32:38] Estimates taken later placed the gap at somewhere between 15 and
[32:41] 30 minutes, and Godfrey himself sometimes described it as longer
[32:46] still. In fact, it wasn't until he was
[32:50] back at the station that he realized he'd returned much
[32:53] later than he should have. To make matters more bizarre, a
[32:57] driver on the same Rd. roughly 3 miles further on reported seeing
[33:01] a bright white object at a time that matched his.
[33:05] When officers returned to the spot where the object had
[33:08] hovered, they found an oddly dried, swirled patch of roadway
[33:12] in an area that was otherwise soaked with rain.
[33:16] The cows Godfrey had been looking for turned up at sunrise
[33:19] in a rain drenched field, allegedly with no hoof prints in
[33:23] the mud to explain how they'd got there.
[33:26] Godfrey's police issued boots, sturdy service grade leather,
[33:30] were split along the soles as if he'd been dragged across
[33:33] something rough. Under hypnosis arranged later as
[33:37] part of an independent investigation into the incident,
[33:40] he reportedly described being taken into a strange room.
[33:45] There he reportedly encountered a tall, bearded figure alongside
[33:48] several small mechanical looking beings he compared to robots.
[33:53] There was no physical evidence to confirm any of it beyond the
[33:56] marks already noted and a faint red mark that appeared on his
[34:00] foot. Godfrey has stood by his account
[34:03] consistently in the decades since, giving interviews on
[34:07] television, on the radio and in print.
[34:11] The press coverage damaged his career significantly, and by
[34:15] 1981 he'd been pushed out of the West Yorkshire Police on grounds
[34:20] officially unrelated to the sighting itself.
[34:23] However, it was generally understood that his colleagues
[34:27] expressed concern that he had become a liability in light of
[34:31] this bizarre incident. He's maintained ever since that
[34:35] he saw what he saw that something happened to him that
[34:39] morning that he can't explain. According to some theorists,
[34:44] this suggests that Adamski was also abducted in a similar way,
[34:48] though he wasn't so lucky. 4 broad explanations have
[34:53] circulated about Adamski's death since 1980, and none of them
[34:57] accounts for every detail on the table.
[35:00] The 1st is an extraterrestrial abduction, which is the theory
[35:04] that made the case internationally famous.
[35:07] Its supporters point to the absence of cold disturbance
[35:09] around the body, the unidentified ointment and the
[35:13] unusual burns. They also note his sloppily cut
[35:17] hair, the missing beard growth, and the fact that Godfrey had
[35:21] his own apparent encounter less than half a mile from the coal
[35:25] yard. The second theory is far more
[35:28] grounded and far more mundane, suggesting foul play by a group
[35:32] of local men. Under this version, Adamski was
[35:36] grabbed shortly after leaving home and held somewhere for
[35:40] several days. During this time, he was
[35:43] subjected to some form of assault that left him burned.
[35:48] He was then treated with whatever was on hand, but when
[35:52] his captors realized he was dying, he was then dumped.
[35:57] The problem with this theory is the absence of any suspects, any
[36:01] confessions, any witnesses, or any forensic link to a specific
[36:06] location. There's also been no indication
[36:10] of any motive in the decades since, since all indications are
[36:14] that amongst the locals he was well liked.
[36:18] The third explanation is a theory involving Eastern Bloc
[36:21] intelligence, and personally it's the one that I prefer.
[36:24] Adamski was Polish, and Poland in June 1980 was a country on
[36:29] the edge of the Solidarity uprising that would detonate
[36:31] weeks later. A handful of writers have
[36:34] speculated that he had information, contacts or a past
[36:39] that made him of interest to the KGB or its allied services.
[36:44] They believe that his body was left as a message or as the
[36:48] result of a botched interrogation.
[36:51] That said, there's no evidence Adamski had any political
[36:55] involvement of that kind, and no declassified documentation has
[36:59] ever emerged to support it. However, the area had many Poles
[37:04] who very specifically didn't return to communist Poland and
[37:08] were actively interested in breaking the Soviet yoke.
[37:11] My personal speculative theory is that Eastern Bloc agents may
[37:15] have mistook Adamski for someone who was politically active and
[37:18] abducted him. Under this theory, I believe he
[37:22] may have suffered from a heart attack during the interrogation,
[37:26] and the agents then dumped his body in a manner that looked
[37:29] intentionally mysterious. This would provide some
[37:32] explanation of the unusual situation he was found in and
[37:36] why the evidence didn't make any sense.
[37:40] The fourth theory, which surfaced in later decades after
[37:43] family conversations with independent investigators,
[37:46] points to a domestic dispute. According to accounts published
[37:50] years later, a relative of the Adamski's had been experiencing
[37:54] marital troubles. Under this theory, Adamski had
[37:58] tried to intervene on behalf of one of the parties, and he was
[38:01] abducted in an attempt to persuade him to forget about the
[38:04] whole situation. That said, this theory
[38:09] essentially has absolutely no evidence to back it up, and
[38:13] there's no confirmation that Adamski had inserted himself in
[38:17] any familial dispute. In the end, what survives of
[38:22] Sigmund Adamski more than 4 decades later is a coroner's
[38:26] open verdict and the memory of a middle-aged minor who walked out
[38:30] one afternoon. While his case has become
[38:33] somewhat legendary for its connection with
[38:35] extraterrestrials, ultimately this connection never would have
[38:39] happened without Godfrey's subsequent claims.
[38:43] In the end, I strongly suspect that foul play was involved, and
[38:47] I think the timing with the Solidarity uprisings in Poland
[38:51] is simply too convenient to be ignored.
[38:54] After all, the area where he lived was rich with anti
[38:57] communist Polish exiles, the exact sort of people who may
[39:01] have been supporting the movement from abroad.
[39:05] While there's nothing to suggest this is what Adamski was doing,
[39:08] he may have known people involved in the movement and
[39:11] this alone may have been enough for him to be targeted.

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