# 2+ Hours of Twisted True Crime Cases | Cold Case Compilation | 249

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 7 Jun 2026, 2 h 16 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO1211182717.mp3

Join me for 2+ hours of disturbing true crime cases. Episode 249 of the true crime podcast btw, and a compilation of five previous videos in this series. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: ❤️ 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, cold cases, true crime, true crime solved, 5 true crime cases, cold case compilation, true crime compilation, fall asleep

## Transcript

[0:01] On August 20th, 1997, a white 1989 Dodge Ram van was found
[0:07] sitting in the parking lot of Pilot Country Airport, a small
[0:10] airstrip in Spring Hill, FL, about 40 miles north of Tampa.
[0:16] The keys had been left on the floorboard.
[0:18] There was no note, no sign of a struggle, and no indication of
[0:22] where the vehicle's owner had gone.
[0:25] That owner was Jack Donald Lewis, a 59 year old self-made
[0:30] millionaire who went by dawn and nobody had seen or heard from
[0:33] him in two days. His wife Carol had reported him
[0:38] missing on August 19th after he'd failed to come home the
[0:41] night before. What followed was one of the
[0:44] strangest missing persons cases in Florida history, a case that
[0:48] would simmer for over 2 decades before exploding into the
[0:51] national consciousness due to tigers.
[0:55] Don Lewis wasn't born into wealth, though he had a
[0:58] remarkable talent for building it.
[1:01] He'd grew his fortune the hard way, grinding through the
[1:04] trucking industry, flipping used cars, and eventually amassing a
[1:08] real estate portfolio across the Tampa Bay area.
[1:13] By the mid 1990s, he was a millionaire several times over,
[1:17] though you wouldn't necessarily know it by looking at him.
[1:21] People who knew him described a man who was more comfortable in
[1:24] jeans and a trucker cap than a suit.
[1:27] He was someone who'd made his money through relentless deal
[1:30] making rather than any kind of corporate Polish, and he liked
[1:34] when people underestimated him. He'd married his first wife,
[1:38] Gladys Cross, and together they'd had three daughters,
[1:42] Donna Pettis, Linda Sanchez and GAIL Rathbone.
[1:47] That marriage ended in divorce in 1990.
[1:50] By then, Don had already been involved with the woman who'd
[1:53] become a central figure in the mystery of his disappearance.
[1:57] He'd met Carol in January 1981 on a roadside in Tampa after
[2:02] stopping to ask her out while she was walking.
[2:05] They married in 1991, and a year later the couple Co founded a
[2:10] big cat sanctuary called Wildlife on Easy Street, which
[2:15] would eventually become Big Cat Rescue.
[2:18] The sanctuary sat on their property in the Citrus Park area
[2:21] of Tampa, and from the outside, it probably looked like
[2:24] something they both cared about equally.
[2:27] But behind the scenes, they reportedly didn't see eye to eye
[2:31] on what the operation should be. Don wanted to breed exotic cats
[2:36] and run the sanctuary as a business.
[2:39] Carol reportedly wanted to shift toward rescue work and a
[2:43] nonprofit model. That disagreement, by multiple
[2:46] accounts, generated real tension between them.
[2:51] By 1997, the marriage between Don and Carol Lewis was in
[2:56] serious trouble, and the disagreements over the sanctuary
[2:59] were just the surface layer of a deeper fracture.
[3:03] Don had reportedly begun spending more and more time in
[3:06] Costa Rica, where he owned a 200 acre property near the town of
[3:10] Begasas. He'd been transferring Florida
[3:13] properties into a Costa Rican entity called the Weeto
[3:16] Corporation, and people close to him believed he was preparing to
[3:20] move his assets out of the country.
[3:23] His daughters later said publicly that they believe their
[3:26] father was planning to leave Carroll.
[3:29] Then, in July 1997, just weeks before his disappearance, Don
[3:34] Lewis went to the Hillsborough County Courthouse and filed for
[3:38] a restraining order against his wife.
[3:41] In the filing, he reportedly alleged that Carol had
[3:44] threatened to end his life, but the court didn't grant the
[3:47] injunction, potentially suggesting it may have been a
[3:51] strategic move. That said, the specifics of why
[3:55] it was denied aren't entirely clear from the public record.
[4:00] There was another troubling detail that preceded the
[4:03] disappearance. Don's family and associates
[4:06] later revealed that in the months before he went missing,
[4:09] questions had been raised about his mental competency.
[4:13] A competency evaluation had reportedly been sought, though
[4:17] the circumstances surrounding it and who exactly initiated the
[4:21] process have been the subject of conflicting accounts.
[4:25] What's not in dispute is that Don Lewis in the summer of 1997
[4:31] had a lot of forces pulling at him from different sides.
[4:35] There was a marriage falling apart, a fight with his wife
[4:39] over the sanctuary, family members worried about his mental
[4:42] state, and money tied up in two countries.
[4:47] The last confirmed sighting of Don Lewis was on August 18th,
[4:51] 1997. He reportedly left his property
[4:54] that morning and told Carol he was heading to Costa Rica.
[4:59] His pilot's license had been suspended at the time following
[5:02] a string of three previous aviation incidents, so he
[5:06] couldn't have legally flown himself anywhere.
[5:10] That said, if he was indeed planning on fairly literally
[5:14] flying the coop and disappearing into thin air, this lack of a
[5:18] license presumably wasn't a major concern.
[5:21] No record of him boarding a commercial flight has ever
[5:24] surfaced, and no passport activity was recorded.
[5:28] For a man who was allegedly planning on leaving the country,
[5:32] there's absolutely no meaningful evidence he ever got on a plane.
[5:36] Two days later, his van turned up at Pilot Country Airport, a
[5:40] rural airstrip in Pasco County. The location was odd.
[5:45] It wasn't a commercial airport. It wasn't particularly close to
[5:49] his home or the sanctuary. The keys on the floorboard
[5:53] suggested the van had been left in a hurry, or perhaps staged to
[5:57] look that way. Investigators at the time
[6:01] couldn't determine how Don might have left the area after
[6:04] arriving at the airstrip, or whether he'd even been the one
[6:08] to drive the van there in the first place.
[6:12] The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office opened a
[6:14] missing persons investigation, and detectives searched Don's
[6:18] properties. They canvassed the area around
[6:21] Pilot Country Airport, and they also looked into his Costa Rican
[6:25] connections. The investigation quickly hit
[6:28] complications, especially since Don Lewis had reportedly been
[6:32] involved in what I'll euphemistically call some
[6:35] questionable business dealings in Costa Rica.
[6:39] He'd loaned money to individuals who were allegedly connected to
[6:42] organized crime groups in the region.
[6:45] Some investigators explored whether his disappearance could
[6:48] have been connected to those financial entanglements.
[6:52] This theory goes that these underworld figures, rather than
[6:56] paying off their significant debts, decided to pay back their
[7:00] loans in lead. Others looked closer to home,
[7:05] and Don's daughters made no secret of their suspicions about
[7:09] Carol. They pointed to the failed
[7:11] restraining order, the marital strife, and what happened next
[7:16] with their father's estate. Within years, and without a body
[7:21] or any physical evidence of foul play, the case stalled.
[7:25] In 2002, five years after Don Lewis vanished, he was declared
[7:31] legally dead by a Florida court. And that's when the fight over
[7:34] his money started. Carole Lewis produced a will and
[7:39] a power of attorney, both reportedly dated 1992, that
[7:43] named her as the sole beneficiary of Don's estate.
[7:47] His three daughters from his first marriage were effectively
[7:50] cut out, and for Don's family, this was the final insult.
[7:55] The documents themselves became the subject of intense scrutiny,
[7:59] and his daughters alleged that Don's signature was traced
[8:02] rather than written freehand. They even retained A handwriting
[8:07] expert to say this. But as someone who has
[8:10] personally retained experts a couple 1000 times, they'll in
[8:14] essence tell you whatever you want to hear.
[8:18] And of course, that's without going into the extreme levels of
[8:21] controversy that surrounds handwriting analysis as a
[8:24] forensic science to begin with. There was also a clause in the
[8:29] will which indicated that the will also applied in case of a
[8:33] potential disappearance, which Don's daughters claimed was
[8:36] suspicious. Also, I have to add, without
[8:41] seeing all the wills that the attorney for Don had ever
[8:43] drafted, it's impossible to know whether this was just something
[8:48] standard that was included. It's very common for lawyers to
[8:52] Add all sorts of seemingly bizarre clauses to cover every
[8:56] eventuality that might occur. Part of the reason for this is
[9:00] actually to protect the lawyer from any future claims of
[9:03] negligence. So, Simply put, this seemingly
[9:07] weird clause could have just been an attorney covering his
[9:09] bases. At any rate, no charges were
[9:14] ever filed and the will was held to be valid for all intents and
[9:18] purposes. Carol maintained that the
[9:21] documents were legitimate and that her husband had willingly
[9:25] included those provisions and the estate passed to her.
[9:30] The Costa Rica angle has never been fully resolved, and Don
[9:33] Lewis had significant holdings there and had been transferring
[9:37] more of his wealth there. Some people who followed the
[9:40] case believed it was possible that Don had simply fled to
[9:43] Central America to start a new life.
[9:47] It's a theory that has a certain appeal and it can't be
[9:50] definitively ruled out. But it has problems.
[9:54] No financial activity in Don's name was ever recorded in Costa
[9:57] Rica after August 1997, and no credible sighting of him was
[10:02] ever confirmed. And the people who knew him
[10:05] best? His daughters, his associates,
[10:08] said it simply wasn't consistent with who he was.
[10:12] Don Lewis loved his family, they said, and he wouldn't have
[10:16] vanished voluntarily without contacting his children.
[10:20] That said, there's the element of the Costa Rican business
[10:23] connections raising darker possibilities, too.
[10:27] Even if he had willingly left for Costa Rica and had been
[10:30] planning a new life there, the more sinister elements in his
[10:33] life may have caught up to him. Some have speculated that these
[10:37] people may have known that he was about to go through an
[10:40] expensive divorce and use this as their opportunity to strike.
[10:45] After all, this would be the perfect potential framing for a
[10:48] voluntary missing persons case. In essence, it was one with a
[10:54] wealthy man disappearing after transferring a large portion of
[10:57] his substantial assets beyond the reach of his soon to be
[11:01] ex-wife. For a crime Lord who wanted to
[11:04] wipe out some debts, this may have been an opportunity that
[11:08] was simply too good to pass up. For over 20 years, the
[11:13] disappearance of Don Lewis was a Tampa area cold case known
[11:17] locally but not nationally. That changed in March 2020 when
[11:22] Netflix released a little docu series called Tiger King, and
[11:26] Don Lewis briefly became the most famous missing man in
[11:29] America. The show primarily focused on
[11:32] the feud between Joe Exotic, a very flamboyant Oklahoma zoo
[11:36] operator, and Carol Baskin. By then, Carol, who had
[11:41] remarried, had become a prominent animal rights advocate
[11:45] running Big Cat Rescue. But it devoted a fairly
[11:48] significant screen time to the unresolved disappearance of Don
[11:52] Lewis, and it presented the case to an audience of 10s of
[11:56] millions in the middle of a global lockdown.
[11:59] Joe Exotic, during his feud with Carol, made numerous
[12:03] unsubstantiated allegations about Carol's involvement in
[12:06] Don's disappearance. Most famously, he promoted the
[12:10] theory that Carol Baskin had fed Don's remains to tigers, even
[12:15] making a music video depicting this alleged happening with a
[12:19] Baskin impersonator. The Hillsborough County
[12:22] Sheriff's Office was flooded with tips, reportedly receiving
[12:26] hundreds in the weeks following the show's premiere.
[12:30] Despite the renewed attention, no charges have been filed and
[12:34] no remains have been recovered. At 11:54 on the morning of
[12:39] December 13th, 2009, a home security camera in a retirement
[12:44] community in Henderson, NV, a Las Vegas suburb, recorded
[12:48] something seemingly ordinary. There was a white 2003 Chevy
[12:52] Cavalier pulling into a cul-de-sac on Savannah Springs
[12:56] Ave. and the car belonged to a 30 year old man named Steven
[13:00] Kocher. He parked at the end of the
[13:03] street, got out, and at some point during the next 6 minutes,
[13:08] walked up to a neighbor's door and rang the bell.
[13:11] By the time the resident answered, Kocher was already
[13:15] walking away across the street. The resident reportedly recalled
[13:20] him saying something about needing money.
[13:23] At noon, another security camera picked up a figure believed to
[13:27] be Coacher, walking eastbound along the sidewalk, turning onto
[13:32] Evening Light St. He was carrying what appeared to
[13:35] be a file folder or some sort of portfolio under one arm.
[13:40] He was dressed in a white shirt and slacks, walking with purpose
[13:44] like someone headed to an important meeting.
[13:48] And then, just like that, he was gone.
[13:51] And no one has seen Steven since.
[13:54] His car sat on that cul-de-sac for days before anyone thought
[13:58] much of it or even noticed it. When it was finally searched,
[14:03] investigators found a shaving kit, clothing, a pillow, a
[14:07] blanket and wrapped Christmas presents he'd bought just two
[14:10] days earlier. His wallet, cell phone, and
[14:13] driver's license were all missing.
[14:15] Everything about the car's content suggested a man who'd
[14:18] been living out of his vehicle, sleeping in parking lots and
[14:22] rest stops in the days before he vanished.
[14:25] The Christmas gifts, for their part, suggested a man who still
[14:29] expected to see his family for the holidays.
[14:33] Steven was born on November 1st, 1979 in Amarillo, TX, one of
[14:38] four children of Rolf and Deanne Kutcher.
[14:41] He attended Rick's College, which later became Brigham Young
[14:45] University, Idaho, and eventually transferred to the
[14:49] University of Utah where he earned a degree in
[14:52] communications. He was an Eagle Scout, an active
[14:56] and devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day
[15:00] Saints, and by most accounts, a genuine, earnest and well liked
[15:05] person. His father, Rolf, was the
[15:09] executive editor of the Davis County Clipper, and Steven
[15:12] followed him into journalism, landing a position at the Salt
[15:16] Lake Tribune in March of 2007. The Tribune job should have been
[15:21] a step forward, but the overnight shift wore him down.
[15:25] He'd work through the night and then try to sleep through the
[15:27] day, which made it nearly impossible to maintain
[15:31] friendships, attend his church, or have anything resembling a
[15:35] normal social life. He stuck it out for over a year,
[15:39] but by mid 2008 he'd had enough and left.
[15:43] And after that, things only got harder.
[15:47] Steven bounced between odd jobs and cities, never quite landing
[15:51] the kind of stable position he believed he was going to get.
[15:55] In April 2009, citing climate issues in the Salt Lake City
[16:00] area, he moved to St. George, UT.
[16:03] He plugged into his local church, signed up to volunteer
[16:06] with the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, and started
[16:10] researching his family history in the area.
[16:13] By all outward appearances, he was trying to build something of
[16:17] a life for himself in the area. But the recession had other
[16:20] plans. Despite sending out resume after
[16:24] resume, full time work wouldn't come.
[16:27] He picked up part time hours handing out Flyers for a local
[16:31] window washing company, but it wasn't enough.
[16:34] By November 2009, he was three months behind on his rent, deep
[16:39] in the hole on his credit cards, and his bank account was rapidly
[16:43] approaching overdraft levels. Three days before he vanished,
[16:49] Steven did something that still puzzles investigators.
[16:52] In the early morning hours of December 10th, he got in his
[16:56] Cavalier and drove 300 miles north on Interstate 15 to Salt
[17:00] Lake City. He stopped for gas, then
[17:03] continued West on Interstate 80 another 125 miles to West
[17:08] Wendover, NV, refueling again there.
[17:12] From there, he drove roughly 100 more miles South into Nevada's
[17:16] Ruby Valley to the ranch of a family named Neff.
[17:21] Steven had previously dated their daughter, Anne Marie, and
[17:24] had visited the ranch before. Anne Marie wasn't there, but the
[17:28] Neff family welcomed him anyway, served him lunch and listened as
[17:32] he told them he was thinking of continuing on to Sacramento to
[17:36] visit relatives. It was an unusual and unexpected
[17:39] visit, to be certain, but Steven wasn't behaving in an unusual
[17:43] manner. The Neffs never did figure out
[17:46] what he had come to tell their daughter, and this remains one
[17:49] of the many unsolved mysteries associated with this missing
[17:52] person's case. After about two hours, he turned
[17:57] around and drove all the way back the way he'd come, stopping
[18:00] for gas in Salt Lake City and Springville before arriving back
[18:04] in Saint George. The round trip covered well over
[18:08] 500 miles in a single day, a punishing drive for a man who
[18:12] could barely afford groceries. No one has ever satisfactorily
[18:17] explained what prompted the trip, though some have tried.
[18:21] The visit to the Neff Ranch may have been the primary
[18:24] motivation, but driving over 500 miles on a whim to visit someone
[18:29] who might not be home is unusual behavior.
[18:33] Notably, it's unclear why he told the Neffs that he was
[18:36] considering driving out to Sacramento, since nothing
[18:40] suggested that was part of his plans at the time.
[18:43] It may have been something he thought up in the spur of the
[18:46] moment to provide more explanation for his somewhat
[18:48] unusual trip and why he was in the neighborhood.
[18:52] It's always possible that this trip to the ranch was completely
[18:55] unrelated to his disappearance, but the proximity of it to what
[18:59] happened makes that seem somewhat unlikely.
[19:04] The night before he vanished, Stephen went to a Kmart in Saint
[19:08] George and bought Christmas presents for his brother and his
[19:11] brother's family. Whatever was going on in his
[19:14] life, he was still thinking about the holidays, and he was
[19:18] clearly still planning ahead. On December 12th, he left Saint
[19:23] George and headed South toward Las Vegas.
[19:26] He reportedly spoke to two friends on his cell phone during
[19:29] the drive and mentioned he was in the Las Vegas area. 1 friend
[19:34] asked if he could cover some volunteer church duties back in
[19:37] Saint George and Stephen offered to turn around, but the friend
[19:41] told him not to bother. What makes the case particularly
[19:45] strange is what happened after those cameras lost sight of him.
[19:49] His cell phone didn't go dark right away, and at around 5:00
[19:52] PM on December 13th, Stevens Phone pinged a cell tower more
[19:57] than 10 miles northeast of where he'd parked his car. 2 hours
[20:01] later, around 7:00 PM, the signal moved again, about two
[20:05] miles north of the previous location.
[20:08] The next morning, December 14th, in the early hours, someone used
[20:14] Stevens Phone to check a voicemail.
[20:17] That had been left by his landlord back in Saint George.
[20:21] The signal was picked up by a tower near US Route 95 and
[20:25] Russell Rd. and after that, the phone remained in that general
[20:30] area for two more days before the signal disappeared entirely.
[20:35] No calls were made during that period and no texts were sent.
[20:39] It was just that one voicemail check and then silence.
[20:43] The phone activity raises an uncomfortable question about who
[20:47] was carrying it and if that person was Steven or not.
[20:51] If he was, then he was alive and moving around the Las Vegas area
[20:55] for at least a day after he vanished.
[20:58] If he wasn't carrying it, then someone else had his phone,
[21:02] which raises the possibility that something happened to him.
[21:06] To this day, investigators have never been able to determine
[21:09] which scenario is more likely. Stevens family reported him
[21:15] missing after they couldn't reach him.
[21:16] In the days following his disappearance, his father, Rolf,
[21:20] who was simultaneously running the Davis County Clipper and
[21:24] serving as a Bishop with the Mormon Church, threw himself
[21:27] into the search. The Las Vegas Metropolitan
[21:31] Police canvas the neighborhood where Stevens car had been
[21:34] found. They brought in helicopters, All
[21:37] Terrain vehicles, sniffer dogs and volunteers, but they found
[21:43] absolutely nothing. Sadly, in February 2011, roughly
[21:49] 14 months after Stephen disappeared, his father Rolf
[21:52] passed away suddenly. The family considered this a
[21:56] devastating piece of circumstantial evidence against
[21:59] the idea that Stephen had simply walked away from his life.
[22:03] They were certain he would have come home for his father's
[22:05] funeral, and the fact that he didn't suggested to them that he
[22:09] couldn't. More than 16 years have passed
[22:14] and the case hasn't moved forward in any meaningful way.
[22:18] In 2018, a police detective who worked the case told reporters
[22:23] that they knew about as much then as they did the moment they
[22:26] realized Steven was gone. No suspect has ever been
[22:31] publicly named, and at least from the public perspective,
[22:34] it's not even certain whether a crime occurred or not.
[22:39] The theories on this case breakdown roughly as you'd
[22:42] expect. Some believe Steven met with
[22:44] foul play in or near the community where he dropped off
[22:48] his car, possibly as the result of a misunderstanding or a
[22:52] situation that escalated quickly.
[22:55] Under this theory, it's possible that his body was dumped
[22:59] somewhere out in the rugged areas surrounding Las Vegas,
[23:02] never to be found. Others believe the cell phone
[23:06] data suggests he left the neighborhood alive and that
[23:09] whatever happened to him occurred later somewhere else in
[23:13] the Las Vegas Valley. A smaller contingent holds out
[23:17] the possibility that Stephen, crushed by financial pressure
[23:21] and isolation, chose to disappear.
[23:24] However, his family has consistently and forcefully
[23:27] rejected this idea, pointing to the Christmas presents and the
[23:31] fact that he never contacted any of them again.
[23:35] Personally, I think given his strong connection to his church
[23:38] and his family, this idea is potentially comforting, but it
[23:42] seems increasingly unlikely. The surveillance footage from
[23:47] that December morning remains the last confirmed trace of
[23:50] Stephen Kocher, a man in a white shirt and slacks, walking with
[23:54] what looked like purpose, carrying something under his
[23:57] arm, turning a corner on a quiet St. in a quiet community in the
[24:01] Nevada desert. The camera caught him for a few
[24:04] seconds and then he walked out of frame and nobody's been able
[24:08] to figure out what happened next.
[24:14] On December 12th, 1910, a 25 year old woman walked out of her
[24:19] family's townhouse on East 79th St. in Manhattan.
[24:24] She told her mother she was going to buy a dress and was
[24:27] never seen again. Her name was Dorothy Arnold, and
[24:31] her disappearance would become one of the most baffling missing
[24:34] persons cases in New York City history.
[24:37] What makes this case so unusual is what happened after she
[24:40] vanished. Her family, one of the
[24:43] wealthiest in New York, waited six weeks before telling the
[24:47] police. To understand why Dorothy
[24:52] Arnold's disappearance played out the way it did, you need to
[24:55] understand who the Arnold's were.
[24:57] Her father, Frances Arnold, was a prosperous perfume importer
[25:02] with deep ties to New York social elite.
[25:06] The family lived at a fashionable address on the Upper
[25:09] East Side and moved in circles where appearances counted for
[25:12] everything. Dorothy was one of four children
[25:16] and had been educated at the Velton School for Girls in New
[25:19] York before attending College in Pennsylvania before she
[25:23] graduated in 19 O 5. She was by all accounts an
[25:27] intelligent and ambitious young woman with aspirations of
[25:30] becoming a published writer. Dorothy took her craft seriously
[25:35] and devoted real time to it, and this detail matters because it
[25:39] was reportedly a source of ongoing tension within the
[25:42] family. Dorothy had submitted stories
[25:45] and essays to various magazines but had been repeatedly rejected
[25:49] from every single one. According to people close to the
[25:53] family, her father disapproved of her literary ambitions and
[25:57] considered them unsuitable for a woman of her social standing.
[26:01] She was supposed to be attending social events and living in the
[26:04] lap of luxury, not competing to earn money.
[26:09] Some have speculated that the fact that her family name and
[26:12] prestige weren't enough to get published contributed to the
[26:16] humiliation for her father. After all, I imagine if her name
[26:21] had been Rockefeller or Aster, her essays would have probably
[26:25] been published. In short, while we can't confirm
[26:29] it, it appears to me at least that her father, who was very
[26:33] class conscious, took this element as a hit to the family's
[26:37] social standing as well. Whatever the case, this all had
[26:41] a highly negative impact on Dorothy.
[26:44] In the months before she disappeared, Dorothy had grown
[26:48] increasingly withdrawn and frustrated by both these
[26:51] rejections and by her father's lack of support.
[26:55] The morning of December 12th was cold and overcast.
[26:59] Dorothy left the Arnold townhouse around 11:30 in the
[27:02] morning, telling her mother she planned to walk along 5th Ave.
[27:06] and buy an evening gown. She had around 25 to $30.00 with
[27:10] her and was wearing a blue dress and a dark hat.
[27:14] What we know of her movements that day comes largely from a
[27:17] single confirmed sighting. There were two other sightings
[27:21] which were largely confirmed but weren't airtight.
[27:24] But I'll get to those two in a moment.
[27:27] Around 2:00 in the afternoon, she ran into a friend, a woman
[27:31] named Gladys King, on 5th Ave. near Brentano's Bookshop, which
[27:36] was then located on 27th St. The two spoke briefly on the
[27:41] sidewalk, and Dorothy reportedly mentioned she'd been out walking
[27:45] and enjoying the air and intended to continue up through
[27:48] the park. She appeared calm and in good
[27:52] spirits, with nothing out of the ordinary during their talk.
[27:56] Gladys King would unfortunately be the last known person who was
[28:00] confirmed with certainty to see Dorothy Arnold alive.
[28:06] Here's where the story takes its strangest and potentially
[28:09] darkest turn. When Dorothy didn't come home
[28:12] that evening, her family grew concerned.
[28:16] But they didn't call the police. Instead, Francis Arnold did what
[28:21] wealthy men of his era did when they had a problem they wanted
[28:25] kept quiet. He hired the Pinkerton National
[28:28] Detective Agency to conduct a private search.
[28:33] For six full weeks, the family kept Dorothy's disappearance
[28:37] entirely out of the public eye, with nothing published about her
[28:40] case. The Pinkertons investigated
[28:44] quietly, checking hospitals, morgues, and hotels across New
[28:48] York and beyond, but found nothing.
[28:51] It wasn't until January 25th, 1911 that the family finally
[28:57] contacted the New York Police Department, and even then it was
[29:01] reportedly done through the family's lawyer rather than
[29:04] directly. The reasons for this delay have
[29:07] been debated ever since, and the most common explanation is the
[29:11] simplest. The Arnolds were terrified of
[29:15] scandal in early 20th century high society.
[29:19] A missing wealthy daughter could mean any number of things, an
[29:23] elopement, a pregnancy, or a mental breakdown.
[29:28] All of these possibilities were considered scandalous at the
[29:31] time, so much so that it was apparently worth the increased
[29:34] risk of losing Dorothy forever. Francis Arnold reportedly feared
[29:39] the press more than almost anything, and his instinct was
[29:42] to keep the matter private. By the time the police were
[29:46] brought in, the trail was already stone cold.
[29:50] Captain John Ayers of the New York Police Department's Bureau
[29:53] of Missing Persons took charge of the investigation.
[29:56] And what he found, or rather what he didn't find, was
[29:59] troubling. There was no evidence Dorothy
[30:02] had booked passage on any steamship leaving New York.
[30:06] No hospital or asylum had admitted anyone matching her
[30:09] description at any point during the relevant period.
[30:13] No bodies had turned up in the rivers, the parks or any of the
[30:16] city's public spaces that matched her description.
[30:20] Her bank account, which reportedly held what has been
[30:23] described as quote UN quote, a modest sum, hadn't been touched.
[30:29] I personally suspect that the amount of money in her bank
[30:31] account was actually quite large, though modest in
[30:35] comparison to the wealth of her family.
[30:38] Detectives canvassed shops along 5th Ave. and questioned dozens
[30:43] of people in the area. The police also pieced together
[30:47] that Dorothy had likely made two purchases that afternoon.
[30:51] There was a box of chocolates from Park and Tilford, which was
[30:54] a confectionery shop, and a copy of a book from Brentano's, the
[30:59] same store near where she saw her friend Gladys.
[31:03] These details came from clerk testimony at both shops who said
[31:07] she was acting totally normally, though given the passage of time
[31:11] they couldn't absolutely confirm it was her.
[31:14] It was mundane stuff, but investigators noted it because
[31:18] it didn't suggest someone on the verge of a desperate act.
[31:22] People planning to do something intentionally don't typically
[31:25] buy boxes of chocolate or a light hearted book to read, or
[31:29] so investigators at the time thought.
[31:32] These days, though, we generally accept that people can keep up
[31:36] appearances or act normally even while under severe mental
[31:40] turmoil. The investigation quickly
[31:44] focused on a man named George Griscom Junior, a young engineer
[31:48] from Pittsburgh who'd been romantically involved with
[31:51] Dorothy. The family had strongly
[31:54] disapproved of the relationship since, as you may have been able
[31:56] to guess, they came from different social classes.
[32:01] While Griscom was actually from a well to do background, the
[32:04] Arnolds wanted her to marry in a more upwardly direction, so to
[32:07] speak. Francis Arnold didn't consider
[32:11] Griscom A suitable match for his daughter, and there was evidence
[32:14] that the couple had carried on their relationship in secret.
[32:18] Letters between the two were later recovered, and their
[32:21] content suggested the relationship was very serious.
[32:26] Griscom was in Italy at the time of Dorothy's disappearance,
[32:29] which the Arnolds were well aware of.
[32:32] In fact, Dorothy's mother, Mary and her brother John reportedly
[32:36] traveled to Florence in January 1911 to confront Griscom and
[32:41] determine whether Dorothy had secretly joined him.
[32:44] Griscom told them he'd received a letter from Dorothy shortly
[32:47] before she vanished, in which she described one of her stories
[32:51] being rejected and expressed deep discouragement.
[32:55] She wrote that she was going to do something drastic with her
[32:58] life, though she didn't specify what.
[33:02] Griscom was eventually cleared as a suspect, but the letter he
[33:05] described was never recovered, and the nature of his
[33:08] relationship with Dorothy kept people talking for years.
[33:12] Some investigators reportedly believed Dorothy may have been
[33:16] pregnant at the time of her disappearance, which would have
[33:20] ruined the Arnold family socially.
[33:23] This theory was never confirmed, but it hungover the case for
[33:27] decades. Multiple theories circulated in
[33:32] the press and among investigators, and none of them
[33:35] were ever definitively ruled in or ruled out.
[33:39] The 1st and most widely discussed was that Dorothy had
[33:41] decided to pull the curtains. Her repeated rejections from
[33:45] publishers, her conflicts with her father, and the vague
[33:49] reference to doing something drastic all pointed in that
[33:52] direction. If she'd walked into Central
[33:55] Park or towards the reservoir area that afternoon, her body
[34:00] could plausibly have gone undiscovered for some time in
[34:03] the parks more remote stretches. The second theory was that she'd
[34:08] eloped or run away to start a new life, possibly under an
[34:11] assumed name. This would have explained the
[34:14] lack of a body and the absence of any financial trail.
[34:19] If she'd planned it carefully, she might have set aside money
[34:23] the family didn't know about, but no credible sighting of her
[34:27] was ever confirmed after December 12th, and for someone
[34:30] of her social prominence to vanish so completely would have
[34:34] taken serious planning. 1/3 theory darker than the others,
[34:40] was that Dorothy had been the victim of foul play.
[34:43] New York in 1910 was a city of over 4 million people, and
[34:48] violence was rarely investigated with any urgency, even for a
[34:52] socialite. This was particularly true when
[34:56] the victim's family was more concerned with discretion than
[34:59] any actual form of justice. The six week delay before police
[35:04] involvement meant that any physical evidence was long gone
[35:08] and potential witnesses had scattered.
[35:11] Some investigators reportedly suspected that Dorothy may have
[35:14] visited a doctor for an illegal medical procedure and passed
[35:18] away from complications. Under this theory, whoever
[35:22] performed the procedure disposed of the evidence to avoid
[35:25] prosecution. This theory was taken seriously,
[35:30] but no proof was ever found, and it wasn't even clear that she
[35:33] was ever pregnant. A final theory, which for
[35:37] reasons you'll soon see almost certainly isn't true, is that
[35:42] her father may have been involved.
[35:46] What happened to the Arnold family afterwards was almost as
[35:49] grim as the disappearance itself.
[35:52] Francis Arnold never stopped believing his daughter was
[35:55] alive, and he reportedly spent years funding private
[35:58] investigators and following up on reported sightings, none of
[36:03] which led anywhere. The strain of the case, combined
[36:07] with the relentless press coverage that followed, broke
[36:10] the family financially and emotionally.
[36:14] Francis Arnold passed away in 1922 without ever learning what
[36:18] happened to his daughter, and by every account, the remainder of
[36:22] his life was dedicated to finding her.
[36:25] I don't believe Francis had anything to do with his
[36:28] daughter's disappearance directly, though I suspect he
[36:31] may have come to believe that his lack of support for her
[36:34] caused it to happen. The New York Police Department
[36:38] officially kept the case open for years, but no additional
[36:42] leads ever panned out. Over a century later, the
[36:46] disappearance of Dorothy Arnold remains unsolved, and at this
[36:50] point, it will likely remain an unsolved mystery forever.
[36:55] Now, that said, I say likely here because there's been cases
[36:58] recently where bodies that were discovered over 100 years ago
[37:03] have been successfully identified.
[37:06] If a breakthrough is to come at this point, like all these
[37:09] cases, it will be through the process of forensic genetic
[37:13] genealogy. There's a piece of security
[37:20] footage from Varna Airport in Bulgaria dated July 8th, 2014
[37:25] that has been watched millions of times online.
[37:29] It shows a young man sprinting through the terminal at full
[37:32] speed, bursting out the doors, tearing across a parking lot and
[37:36] scaling A barbed wire perimeter fence without hesitating.
[37:41] On the other side, he drops into a field, keeps running and
[37:45] vanishes into a tree line. He left behind his wallet, his
[37:49] passport, his phone and every piece of luggage he'd brought on
[37:53] holiday, and nobody has confirmed seeing him since.
[37:57] His name was Lars Mitank, he was 28 years old and to this day not
[38:03] a single person can explain what he was running from or whether
[38:06] there was anything to run from at all.
[38:10] Lars Mitank was born on February 9th, 1986 and grew up in a small
[38:16] town in Schleswig, Holstein in northern Germany.
[38:19] He worked as a technician at a nearby power plant.
[38:23] He had a girlfriend, a group of close friends, and he visited
[38:28] his parents regularly. After his father suffered a
[38:32] stroke, Lars would often stop by the family home after work to
[38:36] help out. By all accounts, he was steady,
[38:40] reliable and well liked. Nothing about his background
[38:44] suggested anything unusual. On June 30th, 2014, Lars flew to
[38:50] Varna, Bulgaria with five friends.
[38:54] They were headed to Golden Sands, a popular seaside resort
[38:58] on the black seacoast. The holiday went well for the
[39:01] first several days, and the group did what groups of young
[39:05] men on a beach holiday tend to do.
[39:07] That changed on the evening of July 6th, the night before they
[39:11] were all supposed to fly home. That evening, Lars and his
[39:16] friends were at a bar in town when he got into an altercation
[39:20] with a group of other German tourists.
[39:23] The dispute was reportedly over soccer teams, and Lars came out
[39:27] of it with a ruptured eardrum and an injured jaw.
[39:31] He went to a local Doctor Who prescribed him an antibiotic
[39:35] called Cefprozil and told him he couldn't fly until his eardrum
[39:39] healed up a bit. This meant Lars had to stay
[39:42] behind while his friends caught their scheduled flight on July
[39:46] 7th. One of his friends offered to
[39:48] stay with him, but Lars turned him down.
[39:52] His mother, Sandra Mitank, booked him into the Hotel Color,
[39:57] a cheap hotel near Varna Airport, and arranged a flight
[40:01] home for the following morning. The plan was simple.
[40:05] One night alone, then home. But Lars never made it.
[40:10] What happened between the afternoon of July 7th and the
[40:13] morning of July 8th is where the story takes a turn that nobody
[40:17] has been able to fully explain. Over the course of that night,
[40:22] Lars called and texted his mother multiple times.
[40:26] Sandra later described him as extremely worried and paranoid.
[40:30] He spoke in whispers as if afraid someone would overhear.
[40:35] He told her the hotel was strange and that he didn't feel
[40:38] safe. In one call, he claimed 4 men
[40:41] were following him and that they intended to rob or harm him, and
[40:45] he begged her to cancel his credit cards.
[40:48] In another, he said he was hiding in a high place and was
[40:52] too afraid to move because he feared falling.
[40:56] He also reportedly asked his mother detailed questions about
[41:00] the ingredients in the antibiotic he'd been prescribed,
[41:04] complaining that his ear pain was getting worse and that he
[41:07] felt disoriented. Hotel security cameras from that
[41:11] night showed Lars pacing the corridors, hiding in elevators,
[41:16] and peering cautiously out of windows.
[41:20] At around 1:00 in the morning on July 8th, he left the hotel for
[41:24] roughly an hour before returning, and nobody knows
[41:27] where he went during that time. By morning, he called his mother
[41:31] again and told her the people following him.
[41:34] We're getting closer. Lars arrived at Varna Airport on
[41:39] the morning of July 8th. He texted Sandra to let her know
[41:43] he was there, but instead of heading to his gate, he went to
[41:47] the airport's medical office since he wanted to see a doctor
[41:51] about his ear before flying. The airport physician, Dr.
[41:55] Kostov, later described Lars as nervous and erratic.
[42:00] While Kostov was examining him, a construction worker walked
[42:03] into the office since the airport was undergoing
[42:06] renovations at the time. According to Kostov, the moment
[42:10] the worker appeared, Lars looked at the worker and began to
[42:14] tremble. He reportedly shouted that he
[42:17] didn't want to perish there and that he needed to get out
[42:19] immediately. And then, just like that, he
[42:22] bolted. He ran out of the medical
[42:24] office, through the terminal and out the front doors.
[42:29] Airport security cameras captured the rest.
[42:33] He sprinted across the parking lot, reached the perimeter
[42:36] fence, climbed it and dropped into a field on the other side.
[42:41] He ran toward a wooded area and disappeared from the frame.
[42:46] In doing so, he left everything behind.
[42:48] His bag, his documents, his phone.
[42:52] He had no money, no identification, no means of
[42:56] communication and no way to contact anyone.
[43:00] That was the last confirmed sighting of Lars Mitank.
[43:04] Bulgarian authorities launched a search within hours and police
[43:08] dogs and helicopters were deployed across a five mile
[43:11] radius around the airport. Ground teams combed nearby
[43:15] forests and villages and reportedly hundreds of
[43:18] volunteers joined in. Despite this massive search
[43:23] effort, none of it produced a single trace of Lars.
[43:27] Sandra hired a private investigator who checked
[43:29] hospital records across the region for unidentified
[43:32] patients. The German Federal Criminal
[43:35] Police Office became involved shortly afterward, coordinating
[43:39] with Bulgarian authorities through Interpol.
[43:42] But despite these efforts, neither detectives nor the
[43:45] private investigator was able to determine what happened to him.
[43:50] Over the years, there have been reported sightings in several
[43:53] countries, but none have been confirmed.
[43:57] One of the more widely discussed came in 2019, when a truck
[44:01] driver in eastern Germany came forward to say he'd picked up a
[44:05] hitchhiker near Dresden who looked like Lars with a beard.
[44:09] Investigators followed up but couldn't locate the man, and
[44:13] it's widely believed that this was a man who simply,
[44:15] coincidentally looked similar. The central question in this
[44:21] case isn't just where Lars went, though.
[44:23] It's also why he ran. Something happened inside his
[44:27] head between the evening of July 6th and the morning of July 8th
[44:32] that transformed a normal young man on a beach holiday into
[44:36] someone who was truly terrified. One theory that has received
[44:41] perhaps the most attention centers on the properties of the
[44:45] antibiotic he was prescribed. There have been documented cases
[44:50] of cefprozil causing psychiatric side effects in rare instances,
[44:54] including paranoia, hallucinations and confusion.
[44:59] Lars mother has reportedly supported this theory, as have
[45:04] doctors who later reviewed his medical history.
[45:07] The idea is that the medication, possibly combined with stress,
[45:12] sleep deprivation and the pain of his ear injury, could have
[45:16] triggered a break with reality. But the airport Dr. Kostov,
[45:20] according to some sources, has complicated this theory.
[45:25] It's been reported that Doctor Kostov told the police that Lars
[45:28] had mentioned that he had never even filled the prescription.
[45:32] If that's accurate, it would mean the medication wasn't
[45:35] responsible for his behavior, which leaves the question of
[45:38] what was. Personally, I have to question
[45:41] this since Sandra, his mother, reported that her son had asked
[45:46] to know what ingredients were in the antibiotic he was taking.
[45:51] That suggests to me that Lars may have been in a mental state
[45:54] where he believed he ought not disclose what medication he'd
[45:57] been taking. Which brings me to the next
[46:00] theory. Another possibility is that Lars
[46:04] experienced a genuine psychiatric crisis that was
[46:07] largely unrelated to the medication.
[46:10] Acute psychotic episodes can occur in otherwise healthy
[46:13] people, sometimes triggered by stress, isolation, sleep
[46:18] deprivation, or a combination of all three.
[46:23] Lars was alone in a foreign country for the first time,
[46:27] injured, in pain, separated from everyone he knew, and unable to
[46:32] fly home. That's a significant amount of
[46:35] stress for anyone, and the disorientation and fear could
[46:39] have spiraled. There's also the possibility
[46:43] that Lars was actually being followed, since we know that the
[46:47] altercation at the bar on July 6th was real, the men he fought
[46:52] with were real, and it's conceivable that they or their
[46:56] associates tracked him down afterward, and that his fear was
[47:00] a rational response to a genuine threat.
[47:04] According to those who subscribe to this theory, this potentially
[47:07] answers the question as to why no trace of Lars was ever found.
[47:13] None of these theories have been confirmed or ruled out, and the
[47:16] investigation has produced no physical evidence pointing in
[47:19] any direction. In particular.
[47:22] The video of Lars has become one of the most watched missing
[47:25] persons videos on the Internet. People keep watching it, trying
[47:30] to read something in his body language and looking for some
[47:34] clue in the footage that might explain what was going through
[47:37] his mind in those final seconds. But so far, there isn't 1.
[47:43] There's just a young man running as fast as he can, and then
[47:46] there's simply nothing at all. On a snowy January night in the
[47:50] winter of 1993, a 17 year old high school senior in Saint Paul
[47:56] told her little brother that if she didn't come home, he should
[47:59] come looking for her. She even named the person she
[48:02] didn't trust. Then she walked out the door and
[48:06] into one of Minnesota's most haunting cold cases.
[48:10] Hang Lee lived with her family in the McDonough Homes, a public
[48:14] housing complex on the North End of Saint Paul.
[48:17] The Lees were Hmong refugees, part of the wave of families
[48:21] who'd fled Laos and rebuilt their lives in Minnesota's long
[48:25] winters. Hang had a strong work ethic
[48:29] that had her picking up shifts at a cafe while she planned for
[48:32] post secondary education. She was saving for the
[48:35] University of Minnesota and also handing over a portion of her
[48:39] paycheck to her parents to help support the family.
[48:43] Hang was looking to make a bit more money so she could save
[48:46] more, and that's where this case begins.
[48:50] The setup came from an 18 year old acquaintance named Nikki
[48:53] Lee, who for clarity's sake, wasn't related to Hang.
[48:57] Nikki claimed she worked as a secretary for a carpentry
[49:00] business and that her boss was hiring.
[49:03] She told Hang she'd come by and introduce her sometime between
[49:08] 6:00 and 7:00 that evening. Hang pulled on her black leather
[49:11] jacket AT shirt, black jeans and her silver bracelets, and she
[49:17] headed out into a heavy Minnesota snow.
[49:20] Before she left, Hang made a point of telling her brother she
[49:24] didn't fully trust Nikki, though of course she had no idea what
[49:28] was in store for her. Nikki's version of the night
[49:32] eventually given to police went roughly like this.
[49:36] A man named Mark Wallace picked them up in a white pickup truck.
[49:41] They switched vehicles somewhere along the way, moving into a tan
[49:45] or silver 1988 Chevrolet Cavalier.
[49:48] The snow was coming down hard. Wallace dropped Nikki off 1st,
[49:53] and she said the last thing she saw was hang sliding into the
[49:56] front passenger seat as Wallace pulled back onto the road.
[50:01] Here's where the story gets worse, because Mark Wallace
[50:04] wasn't some random contact. He was 30 years old in January
[50:08] of 1993, and he'd been out of prison for roughly 18 months
[50:14] before that. He'd been serving time for two
[50:16] illicit assault convictions in 1987, which really makes me
[50:21] question how he was out prowling the streets in 1993 to begin
[50:25] with. Disturbingly, in one of those
[50:28] cases, he'd lured a teenager from Cottage Grove into his
[50:32] vehicle on the promise of a job interview and then assaulted
[50:36] her. And then, a year and a half
[50:39] after his release, a young woman disappeared after getting into
[50:43] his car on the promise of a job interview.
[50:47] Court filings from later years would add more detail to the
[50:51] template of his actions. Ex girlfriends reportedly
[50:55] described a man who drugged partners and restrained them,
[50:59] threatening them with worse violence if they planned on
[51:01] talking to the cops. For the first six months, the
[51:05] police investigation into Hangley's disappearance
[51:08] effectively went nowhere, telling her family that she was
[51:12] just a runaway. Nikki herself didn't come
[51:15] forward with Wallace's name until she saw the family's
[51:17] missing person Flyers circulating, and even then, the
[51:21] case drifted. The file eventually landed years
[51:25] later with a Saint Paul investigator named Kevin
[51:28] Navarro. When Navarro pulled hangs file,
[51:32] he discovered a strange piece of local history.
[51:35] His own father had worked the case decades earlier.
[51:39] Navarro inherited it, in a way, the way sons sometimes inherit
[51:43] their father's unfinished business.
[51:46] Except he took things much more seriously.
[51:49] By 2009, Navarro had enough probable cause to search
[51:53] Wallace's property, and what happened next is the kind of
[51:58] thing that should have broken the case wide open. 3 cadaver
[52:02] dogs were brought through Wallace's garage, and reportedly
[52:06] all three alerted on the same spot near the back wall.
[52:10] Ground penetrating radar was brought in next, and it picked
[52:13] up a large object buried beneath the floor, something roughly the
[52:17] shape and size of a tree trunk. Navarra asked for permission to
[52:21] tear up the concrete and find out what was down there, but a
[52:25] judge said no. Cadaver dog hits and a shape
[52:29] under the floor weren't on their own enough to justify the
[52:33] demolition. Wallace remained a free man
[52:36] through the 20 tens, but I'm probably not going to shock you
[52:40] when I say his behavior didn't change.
[52:43] In 2016, he was arrested after a 20 year old woman was found in a
[52:47] motel room where he'd been holding her against her will.
[52:52] During that case, she told investigators that Wallace had
[52:55] said something chilling in an unguarded moment.
[52:59] Paraphrased, his line was that a woman had once walked into his
[53:03] business and never walked out, and investigators read that as a
[53:06] reference to Hang Lee. Wallace was ultimately sentenced
[53:11] to 54 months for felony kidnapping, despite his previous
[53:15] convictions. Fortunately, though, he wasn't
[53:18] released and a civil court forced him into involuntary
[53:21] treatment due to his history of sick acts.
[53:25] He remains in a forensic psychiatric unit until this day,
[53:29] where he is apparently receiving treatment to try to change his
[53:32] nature. Somehow, against all odds,
[53:36] that's where things currently stand with Hang Lee's case.
[53:40] There have been no more investigations into property,
[53:43] and the large object that the sniffer dogs got a hit on has
[53:47] never been excavated. Hang Lee still remains
[53:50] officially classified as a missing person and no one has
[53:53] ever been charged for her disappearance.
[54:00] A 29 year old woman said good morning to a stranger in her
[54:03] driveway. Seconds later, she'd been shot 4
[54:06] times. The entire thing was captured on
[54:10] a doorbell camera, and the shooter drove away in a dark
[54:13] pickup truck. And now, more than seven years
[54:16] later, nobody has been arrested. That's the case of Elizabeth
[54:21] Barraza, and it's one of the most frustrating unsolved cases
[54:25] in recent Texas history. Elizabeth Barraza, known to most
[54:31] people as Liz, lived in the Princeton Place subdivision near
[54:35] Tomball, TX, roughly 30 miles northwest of Houston.
[54:39] She worked as a data reporter for the Rosen Group, a pipeline
[54:43] inspection company. She'd married her husband,
[54:46] Sergio Barraza, in 2014 after the two of them met while
[54:52] attending Sam Houston State University together.
[54:56] On the morning of Friday, January 25th, 2019, Liz had
[55:01] called off from work. She and Sergio were scheduled to
[55:05] leave two days later for a trip to Orlando, specifically to
[55:09] visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter for their 5th
[55:11] wedding anniversary. The garage sale she was setting
[55:15] up that morning in their driveway on Cedar Walk Dr. was
[55:19] meant to raise a little extra spending money for the trip.
[55:23] She'd put out a cash box with about $100 in change.
[55:27] Sergio left for his job installing flooring at
[55:30] approximately 6:45 that morning, while Liz stayed behind to
[55:34] arrange items in the driveway. A dark colored truck pulled into
[55:38] the neighborhood and came to a stop near the Barraza home.
[55:42] Surveillance footage from. Several cameras.
[55:45] In the area, including the Barraza's own doorbell camera
[55:49] captured what happened next. A figure stepped.
[55:53] Out of the driver's side. Of the vehicle, the person was
[55:56] wearing a long jacket and tall boots and appeared to be wearing
[56:00] a wig. The figure approached Liz in the
[56:03] driveway. On the doorbell camera audio,
[56:07] you can hear Liz greet the person with a good morning.
[56:10] Some investigators have noted that the suspect may have handed
[56:13] Liz something, possibly a note, though this detail hasn't been
[56:17] officially confirmed. What happened next took only
[56:21] seconds. Four shots were fired. 3 struck
[56:25] Liz in the chest, one struck her in the head.
[56:29] The shooter then returned to the truck and drove away, leaving
[56:33] the engine running through the entire encounter.
[56:36] Liz was rushed to the hospital where she passed away from her
[56:39] injuries later that day. The $100 in the.
[56:43] Cashbox was left. Untouched and nothing was taken
[56:46] from the home. Simply put, this wasn't a
[56:50] robbery. Multiple neighborhood.
[56:53] Cameras picked up the. Suspect's vehicle, a dark
[56:55] colored Nissan Frontier. The doorbell camera captured the
[56:59] suspect approaching Liz, and there's audio of the shooting
[57:04] investigators had. More to work with than.
[57:06] They do in many cases that end up getting solved and yet the
[57:10] suspect has never been identified.
[57:13] Part of the reason is forensic. The weapon used was a revolver,
[57:17] which doesn't eject shell casings.
[57:20] Beyond that, there was absolutely no other forensic
[57:23] evidence found at the scene, such as hair fibers or
[57:26] fingerprints. Whoever did this was careful.
[57:30] And that level of care is one of the reasons the Harris County
[57:33] Sheriff's Office has long believed the shooting was
[57:35] premeditated. The disguise is another
[57:38] indicator. The long jacket and wig suggest
[57:42] the shooter was trying to obscure their appearance.
[57:45] And it worked. Investigators haven't been able
[57:48] to conclusively determine whether the suspect was male or
[57:51] female. Analysis of the footage has
[57:54] suggested the person appeared somewhat feminine in build and
[57:57] gait, which has LED some to believe that the shooter could
[58:01] potentially be a woman. However, like with so many
[58:05] things related to this attack, nothing has been confirmed.
[58:10] One of the most. Important questions in this.
[58:12] Case is how the shooter knew Liz would be alone in that driveway
[58:16] at that hour. On that particular morning, the
[58:19] garage sale hadn't been advertised online.
[58:23] Liz had posted signs that morning, but the shooter arrived
[58:27] before most people in the neighborhood would have even
[58:29] seen them. She'd called out of work, so
[58:32] only a relatively small circle of people knew her plans for the
[58:35] day. The shooter also appeared to
[58:38] time the approach for shortly after Sergio left for work,
[58:42] which suggests they may have known his schedule or been
[58:45] watching the house. This has led to speculation that
[58:48] someone for some reason decided to target Liz.
[58:52] Her own father has publicly stated that he believes his
[58:55] daughter was the target of a hit man, though ultimately there's
[58:59] no actual evidence to support this notably.
[59:03] Sergio Barraza. Has been thoroughly
[59:05] investigated, cooperated fully with authorities, and passed
[59:09] polygraph tests. He has not been named a suspect.
[59:14] And as of now, that's where things stand, with Elizabeth
[59:18] Barraza's Case No closer to being solved today than it was
[59:22] when it happened. A torn purse.
[59:28] An unfinished. Note and a young actress who
[59:31] walked out of her front door one Friday evening and was never
[59:34] seen again. That's the short version.
[59:38] The long version involves the Hollywood studio system,
[59:41] organized crime figures who were vanishing left and right, and an
[59:45] investigation that went cold before it ever really got warm.
[59:50] The disappearance of Gene Spangler in October 1949 remains
[59:53] one of Los Angeles's most frustrating unsolved cases, and
[59:58] the deeper you look into it, the more disturbing it becomes.
[1:00:02] Gene Spangler was. Born on September 2nd. 1923 in
[1:00:06] Seattle, WA, the youngest of four children.
[1:00:10] Her family relocated to Los Angeles while she was still in
[1:00:13] school, and by her teenage years she'd found work as a dancer at
[1:00:19] the Earl Carroll Theater and the Florentine Gardens nightclub.
[1:00:23] The Florentine Gardens, in particular, had a reputation
[1:00:26] that extended well beyond the entertainment on its stage.
[1:00:30] It was a place where aspiring performers rubbed shoulders with
[1:00:33] studio executives, press agents and men whose business interests
[1:00:38] didn't show up on any legitimate tax return or public record.
[1:00:43] For a young woman trying to break into the film industry, it
[1:00:47] was exactly the kind of environment that could open
[1:00:49] doors or swallow you whole. By the late 1940s, Spangler had
[1:00:55] transitioned from nightclub work to film.
[1:00:58] Though transitioned might be generous, she landed uncredited
[1:01:02] bit parts and dance roles in pictures, like When My Baby
[1:01:06] Smiles at Me in 1948 and Chicken Every Sunday in 1949.
[1:01:14] Spangler was 1. Of thousands of young women.
[1:01:16] Feeding the studio system's appetite for background players
[1:01:19] and extras, these were women who spent their days waiting around
[1:01:23] on sets and their evenings circulating through the social
[1:01:27] machinery that kept Hollywood running.
[1:01:30] It wasn't glamorous work at all, and the pay reflected that.
[1:01:35] Her personal life wasn't much easier.
[1:01:38] She'd married a man named. Dexter Benner.
[1:01:40] At 19 in 1942 and filed for divorce after just six months
[1:01:47] despite this, they. Spent the next 4.
[1:01:49] Years in an on again off again relationship before the divorce
[1:01:54] was finalized in 1946. They had a daughter, Christine,
[1:02:00] and the custody battle that followed was Vicious Spangler.
[1:02:05] Alleged that Benner had repeatedly.
[1:02:06] Prevented her from seeing Christine.
[1:02:09] She was eventually awarded sole custody in 1948, though the
[1:02:14] agreement came with strings attached.
[1:02:17] Christine couldn't be involved in any film projects until she
[1:02:20] was 12, and Spangler needed legal approval before accepting
[1:02:24] work outside California on the evening.
[1:02:28] Of Friday, October 7th. 1949 Jean Spangler told her
[1:02:32] sister-in-law that she was heading out to meet Dexter
[1:02:35] Benner about a late support payment for their daughter.
[1:02:38] After that she said she'd be going to work a night shoot on a
[1:02:42] film set. She left the house.
[1:02:45] Around 5:00. At roughly 6A, saleswoman at a
[1:02:50] grocery store only a few blocks from Spangler's home in the
[1:02:53] Wilshire district noticed her browsing through the stalls.
[1:02:57] The woman later told investigators that Spangler
[1:03:00] appeared to be waiting for someone around 7:00.
[1:03:04] Spangler. Called home and told her
[1:03:06] sister-in-law she'd be working the full 8 hours and probably
[1:03:10] wouldn't make it back that night.
[1:03:13] That brief phone. Call was the last.
[1:03:15] Anyone heard from her? When Spangler didn't return the
[1:03:18] following day, her sister-in-law filed a missing person report
[1:03:22] with the Wilshire Division of the LAPD.
[1:03:25] The initial police response was sluggish at best.
[1:03:28] Officers assumed she was off on some personal adventure and
[1:03:32] would show up on her own within a day or two.
[1:03:35] It took the discovery of her purse two days later to change
[1:03:39] the tempo of the investigation entirely on October. 9th
[1:03:44] Spangler. 'S handbag was found near the
[1:03:46] Ferndale entrance to Griffith Park, roughly 5 1/2 miles from
[1:03:51] her home. Both straps on one side had been
[1:03:54] torn loose, as though the bag had been ripped from her arm.
[1:03:59] There was no money inside, though investigators didn't
[1:04:02] believe robbery was the motive. What they did find was a
[1:04:06] handwritten note, unfinished, that read Kirk can't wait any
[1:04:13] longer, going to see Doctor Scott.
[1:04:16] It will work best this way while Mother is away.
[1:04:20] The note ended with a comma, as if Spangler had been interrupted
[1:04:23] mid sentence. Nobody in Spangler's life could
[1:04:27] identify a Kirk or a Doctor Scott.
[1:04:30] Her family and close friends drew blanks on both names.
[1:04:34] The note became the investigation's central puzzle,
[1:04:37] and it has never been solved. The discovery of the purse
[1:04:41] triggered one of LA's larger search operations.
[1:04:44] At the time, sixty officers, along with over 100 volunteers
[1:04:49] combed Griffith Park and found nothing.
[1:04:52] The detective who took charge of the case quickly fanned his
[1:04:55] resources out in several directions at once.
[1:04:59] The most immediate lead was the name Kirk, a name that was
[1:05:02] unfamiliar to her family given that Spangler had recently
[1:05:06] appeared as an uncredited extra in the film Young Man with a
[1:05:10] Horn, which starred Kirk Douglas.
[1:05:13] The press made the connection before police did.
[1:05:17] Douglas, who was vacationing in Palm Springs at the time, called
[1:05:20] the lead detective directly after reading about the case in
[1:05:23] the newspapers. He told investigators he barely
[1:05:27] knew Spangler beyond a few brief interactions on set and had been
[1:05:31] out of town when she disappeared.
[1:05:34] Police cleared him. Relatively quickly.
[1:05:37] And by all accounts, his cooperation was genuine and
[1:05:40] unprompted. The Doctor Scott.
[1:05:43] Angle proved equally. Frustrating Investigators
[1:05:47] interviewed every doctor with the surname Scott in the Los
[1:05:50] Angeles area and came up empty. However, friends of Spangler
[1:05:56] offered a more troubling possibility.
[1:05:59] They told police that Spangler was approximately 3 months
[1:06:02] pregnant at the time of her disappearance.
[1:06:05] Witnesses who frequented the same nightclub circuit mentioned
[1:06:08] a former medical student known only as Doc, who reportedly
[1:06:13] performed then illegal back alley procedures for cash.
[1:06:17] Despite weeks of searching, police were never able to track
[1:06:20] this individual down or confirm he actually existed.
[1:06:25] The theory that Spangler had gone to see an unlicensed Dr.
[1:06:28] and that something went fatally wrong became one of the
[1:06:32] investigations. Primary working hypothesis.
[1:06:36] The unfinished note. The reference to a doctor, The
[1:06:39] phrasing about it working best while her mother was away.
[1:06:43] According to some theorists, it all pointed toward a planned
[1:06:46] medical procedure that Spangler wanted to keep private.
[1:06:50] If that procedure went wrong, disposing of the body and the
[1:06:54] evidence would have been straightforward for someone
[1:06:56] already operating outside the law.
[1:06:59] But there was a second. Entirely different.
[1:07:01] Thread running through the investigation, and it involved
[1:07:05] organized crime. Spangler's years working at the
[1:07:08] Florentine Gardens had put her in proximity to figures
[1:07:11] connected to Mickey Cohen, the most powerful mob boss in Los
[1:07:15] Angeles at the time. Specifically, she'd been seen in
[1:07:19] the company of David Ogle, one of Cohen's associates in the
[1:07:23] Palm Springs area, in the week before she vanished.
[1:07:28] Here's where things get. Complicated.
[1:07:31] Ogle himself had reportedly disappeared around the same time
[1:07:35] as Spangler, and he'd recently been indicted on conspiracy
[1:07:38] charges. Another Cohen associate, Frank
[1:07:42] Nikolai, had also dropped off the map.
[1:07:45] In September 1949, customs agents in El Paso, TX reportedly
[1:07:50] spotted Spangler, Ogle and Nikolai together at a hotel
[1:07:54] after all three had vanished, though that was never confirmed
[1:07:59] subsequent sightings. Were reported in Las.
[1:08:02] Vegas, Phoenix, Northern California and Mexico City.
[1:08:07] One theory held that Ogle and Nikolai had agreed to testify
[1:08:11] against Cohen in exchange for reduced sentences.
[1:08:14] When Cohen found out, the theory goes, he had them eliminated and
[1:08:19] Spangler, who happened to be with them, was collateral
[1:08:22] damage. The police have.
[1:08:26] Never officially closed the. Case and Jeanne Spangler remains
[1:08:29] listed as a missing person more than 75 years after she walked
[1:08:33] out of her front door. Whether she died during an
[1:08:37] illegal medical procedure or was caught up in mob violence, we
[1:08:41] simply don't know. What we do know is.
[1:08:44] That a 26. Year old woman left home 1
[1:08:46] evening in 1949, told her family she'd be back and never returned
[1:08:53] her torn purse was. Found in a park with.
[1:08:56] An unfinished note inside, addressed to someone nobody
[1:08:59] could identify, referencing a doctor nobody could find.
[1:09:03] And that was it. The city moved on, as it always
[1:09:07] does. The studios kept churning out
[1:09:10] pictures, and Gene Spangler became one more name on a list
[1:09:14] of people Los Angeles has simply lost.
[1:09:21] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here with that.
[1:09:23] Usual reminder to hit the subscribe button and the
[1:09:25] notification bell and turn on all notifications.
[1:09:29] Now, with that said, let's get back to business.
[1:09:35] A full scholarship to medical school.
[1:09:37] A dream of becoming a neurosurgeon. 8 months of
[1:09:41] backpacking across 4 continents Before the grind began.
[1:09:45] Jesse Galganov had everything mapped out and then somewhere
[1:09:49] above 15,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes, he stepped off
[1:09:53] the edge of the known world and never came back, his family
[1:09:59] spent. Over $1,000,000.
[1:10:00] Searching and the mountains gave them absolutely nothing but more
[1:10:04] questions. Jesse.
[1:10:07] Galganov was 22 years. Old in the fall of 2017, And by
[1:10:12] most measures, he was doing everything right.
[1:10:15] He was a dual American Canadian citizen, raised in Montreal.
[1:10:19] He'd been an honor roll student throughout school and had just
[1:10:22] graduated college that May. He'd earned a full scholarship
[1:10:26] to the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson
[1:10:29] University in Philadelphia, where he planned to pursue
[1:10:32] neurosurgery. But before diving into years of
[1:10:36] sleepless nights and clinical rotations, Jesse wanted to see
[1:10:40] the world. He planned an ambitious 8 month
[1:10:43] trip through South America, Southeast Asia, India and the
[1:10:48] Far East. It was the kind of gap year
[1:10:51] adventure that thousands of young people take every year.
[1:10:54] The kind that's supposed to broaden your horizons, not end
[1:10:58] your life. On September 24th, 2017, Jesse
[1:11:04] flew from Montreal to Lima in Peru.
[1:11:07] Three days later, on September 27th, he boarded an overnight
[1:11:11] bus for the roughly 8 hour ride to Huraz.
[1:11:14] This is a city nestled in the Ankash region that serves as the
[1:11:18] gateway to some of the most spectacular and punishing
[1:11:22] mountain trails on the continent.
[1:11:25] He arrived around 6. 40 in the morning.
[1:11:27] On September 28th and checked into the Came House, a
[1:11:31] backpackers hostel. He sent messages to his mother
[1:11:35] and friends confirming his arrival.
[1:11:38] Later that day, he texted his mother again to say he was
[1:11:41] heading out on the Santa Cruz Trail.
[1:11:44] This is a challenging 20 mile trek through the Cordillera
[1:11:47] Blanca mountain range. He told her he'd be out of cell
[1:11:50] range for a few days and would check in after October 2nd.
[1:11:55] It was the last she'd ever hear from him, the Santa Cruz.
[1:11:59] Trail is a grueling multi. Day route that climbs to roughly
[1:12:02] 15,000 feet above sea level. It winds through glacial valleys
[1:12:08] and overexposed high altitude mountain passes where the
[1:12:12] weather can turn without warning.
[1:12:14] It's not recommended for novice hikers, and even experienced
[1:12:18] trekkers are advised to spend several days acclimatizing to
[1:12:22] the altitude before attempting it.
[1:12:25] Jesse had arrived in Hurrahs on September 28th, and by all
[1:12:29] indications, he was on the trail within a day or two of arrival,
[1:12:34] giving his body almost no time to adjust.
[1:12:37] By September 30th, he'd reached the Talipampa campsite, where he
[1:12:42] spent the night with two French hikers.
[1:12:45] They'd later tell investigators that Jesse appeared disoriented,
[1:12:49] was suffering from headaches and stomach issues, and seemed to
[1:12:52] have gotten lost on his way to the camp.
[1:12:56] These are textbook. Symptoms of acute.
[1:12:58] Altitude sickness, a condition that can rapidly escalate from
[1:13:02] discomfort to confusion to cerebral or pulmonary edema.
[1:13:08] If a person keeps climbing, the body essentially rebels against
[1:13:13] the thin air, and the brain can swell in ways that impair
[1:13:16] judgment long before the person realizes they're in serious
[1:13:20] trouble. The last confirmed sighting of
[1:13:23] Jesse Galganov came on October 1st, 2017.
[1:13:28] Around 3:30 in the afternoon, a group of Czech tourists
[1:13:32] encountered him near Punta Union Pass, the highest point on the
[1:13:36] trail. He asked them for water and
[1:13:39] appeared slightly disoriented, and after that there was
[1:13:42] nothing. His scheduled bus ticket on
[1:13:45] October 2nd went unclaimed and his flight to Bolivia on October
[1:13:50] 5th was never boarded Jesse's. Mother Elisa Clayman.
[1:13:56] Filed a missing person report on October 14th, 2017 after over a
[1:14:02] week of escalating worry. What followed was one of.
[1:14:06] The most determined? Private search efforts in recent
[1:14:08] memory for a missing backpacker Clayman didn't wait.
[1:14:12] For the bureaucratic. Wheels to turn, she flew to Peru
[1:14:16] herself and physically retraced her son's steps on the Santa
[1:14:19] Cruz Trail. By November 2017, the family had
[1:14:24] hired Magnus International, an elite search and rescue firm, to
[1:14:29] conduct a professional operation.
[1:14:32] The effort was enormous, and drones swept the mountain
[1:14:36] valleys. Ground teams combed remote
[1:14:39] sections of trail searchers, interviewed over 200 travellers
[1:14:44] who'd been in the area Around the same time.
[1:14:47] They located the French hikers and the Czech tourists.
[1:14:51] They tracked every known movement Jesse had made, from
[1:14:53] the moment he landed in Lima to the moment he vanished near the
[1:14:57] pass. Despite spending an
[1:14:59] extraordinary sum of money on private investigators, they
[1:15:03] found absolutely nothing, not even a shred of clothing or a
[1:15:07] piece of gear. One detail in.
[1:15:10] The investigation took. The case from a potential hiking
[1:15:13] accident to something far more troubling.
[1:15:16] The owner of the hostel in Haraz initially confirmed that Jesse
[1:15:19] had stayed there, but when Peruvian police followed up, the
[1:15:23] owner changed his story and denied Jesse had ever been at
[1:15:26] the hostel at all. This directly contradicted the
[1:15:30] Snapchat messages Jesse had sent to friends from inside the
[1:15:33] hostel, confirming his presence there.
[1:15:37] The false statement was significant enough to escalate
[1:15:40] the investigation from a missing persons case to a criminal
[1:15:43] inquiry, though this approach wouldn't bear fruit.
[1:15:47] Police found that registration logs at the Santa Cruz Trail
[1:15:50] entry point showed no record of Jesse signing in, though such
[1:15:54] logs were notoriously incomplete and poorly maintained.
[1:15:59] The mule drivers. Who worked the trail and.
[1:16:01] Transport Gear for Hikers reportedly refused to cooperate
[1:16:05] with investigators, fearing they'd be held responsible if
[1:16:08] something had gone wrong. Cell phone service providers
[1:16:12] initially stonewalled requests for Jesse's device usage data at
[1:16:17] every turn. The investigation ran into walls
[1:16:20] that shouldn't have been there. The prevailing theory, and the
[1:16:25] one Jesse's mother has come to accept, is that altitude
[1:16:29] sickness did him in. The timeline supports it.
[1:16:33] Jesse went from sea level to 15,000 feet in the mountains
[1:16:37] within roughly 3 days with almost no acclimatization
[1:16:41] period. Multiple witnesses described
[1:16:44] symptoms consistent with acute mountain sickness, headaches,
[1:16:49] gastrointestinal distress, disorientation, and confusion if
[1:16:55] his condition worsened. After the last.
[1:16:57] Sighting near Punta Union, he could have wandered off trail in
[1:17:00] a state of impaired judgment and fallen into one of the many
[1:17:04] ravines or crevasses on the root.
[1:17:07] The Cordillera Blanca is vast, remote, and unforgiving, and
[1:17:11] someone who falls off the trail there may never be recovered,
[1:17:16] but the complete absence of any physical evidence has always
[1:17:19] nagged at investigators and observers alike.
[1:17:22] Typically, when a hiker perishes on a remote trail, something
[1:17:27] turns up eventually. A backpack, a jacket, a boot.
[1:17:32] Jesse's gear was never found. Not a single item.
[1:17:37] The investigators from Magnus International reportedly
[1:17:40] considered criminal involvement a real possibility.
[1:17:43] Precisely because of this total evidentiary void, Jesse's mother
[1:17:48] initially feared he'd been abducted, reasoning that people
[1:17:52] don't simply vanish without leaving something behind.
[1:17:56] The hostile owners lie. The uncooperative mule drivers,
[1:18:01] the missing trail logs. None of it proved foul play, but
[1:18:06] all of it created the kind of informational vacuum where
[1:18:09] suspicion festers. Some have suspected that someone
[1:18:13] may have realized that Jesse was a wealthy foreigner in a
[1:18:16] compromised state and kidnapped him for ransom.
[1:18:19] It's not an unusual crime by any means, though the obvious
[1:18:23] problem with this is that no ransom demand ever came forward.
[1:18:28] The foul play theory rests almost entirely on the absence
[1:18:32] of evidence rather than the presence of it, which makes it
[1:18:35] simultaneously impossible to prove and impossible to dismiss.
[1:18:44] In the early hours of September 4th. 1993 A white Chevrolet
[1:18:48] Astro van rolled to a stop on the corner of S 39th St. in San
[1:18:53] Diego. Inside that van were.
[1:18:56] Several men. Whose names we still don't know
[1:18:58] more than 30 years later. They were carrying at least one
[1:19:02] assault rifle, and based on the spent casings, investigators
[1:19:05] later recovered a few other firearms.
[1:19:08] Besides, they didn't step out. They didn't shout a warning.
[1:19:13] They simply opened fire on a small group of young people
[1:19:16] standing on a quiet residential corner.
[1:19:19] Within seconds, a 21 year old woman named Mimi Barraza was on
[1:19:23] the ground. She'd celebrated her birthday 2
[1:19:26] days before. She had a 2 year old daughter
[1:19:29] waiting at home and to this day no one has ever been arrested in
[1:19:33] connection with her death before.
[1:19:37] The shooting Mimi. Barraza wasn't anonymous.
[1:19:40] In San Diego, she'd been crowned Miss Teen San Diego, a title
[1:19:44] that had put her in newspapers and on stages across the city.
[1:19:48] She was the kind of young woman who'd already started planning a
[1:19:51] serious future, enrolled in college, and openly talking
[1:19:55] about pushing on to law school. After that, friends and family
[1:19:59] described her as ambitious, deeply devoted to her daughter,
[1:20:04] and well liked by everyone who knew her.
[1:20:07] She was, by every available account, a young mother and
[1:20:11] student who happened to be standing in the wrong patch of
[1:20:14] sidewalk on the wrong night in 1993.
[1:20:20] That last detail matters because the men who fired into her group
[1:20:24] of friends almost certainly weren't aiming at her
[1:20:27] specifically. At the time of the.
[1:20:30] Attack Mimi had. Stopped by a friend's house and
[1:20:33] was standing outside with a small group when the Astro van
[1:20:35] approached the corner. Witnesses later described how
[1:20:39] the bullets came from inside the vehicle, sweeping across the
[1:20:42] group on the sidewalk. One of Mimi's girlfriends took
[1:20:47] around to the leg and survived. Mimi herself was struck in the
[1:20:51] head by a bullet from a high-powered rifle, and she
[1:20:55] didn't have time to react. The van took off.
[1:20:58] Into the early morning. Darkness, and within seconds,
[1:21:01] the coroner had gone from a casual gathering to a crime
[1:21:04] scene. A few hours later, officers
[1:21:08] found the van abandoned at the intersection of 19th and G
[1:21:11] Street, several miles away. It had been reported stolen the
[1:21:16] day before, which suggests the perpetrators planned at least
[1:21:19] far enough ahead to grab a vehicle that couldn't be traced
[1:21:23] back to them. Inside the Astro, investigators
[1:21:27] recovered shell casings of multiple calibers, indicating
[1:21:30] that more than one weapon had been fired during the attack.
[1:21:34] That detail painted a picture of a coordinated group of shooters,
[1:21:38] rather than a lone, agitated gunman.
[1:21:42] The San. Diego Police Departments caught
[1:21:44] the. Case quickly and from the
[1:21:46] beginning, their suspicions pointed toward a particular
[1:21:49] corner of the local underworld. Investigators came to believe
[1:21:52] the shooters were Hispanic males affiliated with a street gang
[1:21:57] based in the Logan Heights area. This was a neighborhood that had
[1:22:01] been a center of gang activity in San Diego for decades.
[1:22:05] That alone, however, was not enough.
[1:22:08] There were no eyewitnesses able to put a name to a face inside
[1:22:11] the van. The vehicle itself being stolen
[1:22:15] offered no helpful registration trail and the casings, while
[1:22:20] telling investigators the type of weapons used couldn't on
[1:22:23] their own identify the people pulling the triggers.
[1:22:28] Detectives work the neighborhood reportedly knocked on every door
[1:22:32] they could think to knock on and pressed informants for any
[1:22:35] whisper of who'd been bragging about the crime.
[1:22:38] However, the trouble with gang related cases of this era is
[1:22:43] well documented and witnesses were often terrified to speak
[1:22:48] cooperating informants. Risk their.
[1:22:50] Lives, and sometimes their families lives, by giving up
[1:22:54] names and in a community where the police were often viewed
[1:22:58] with suspicion, the natural reservoir of public help that
[1:23:02] solves most cases simply wasn't there.
[1:23:08] What makes? Mimi's case especially.
[1:23:10] Frustrating is that it didn't happen in isolation.
[1:23:13] In the same general time frame, San Diego and the neighboring
[1:23:17] city of National City were rocked by a string of shootings.
[1:23:22] Investigators believe these attacks were carried out with
[1:23:25] comparable weapons, possibly by the very same crew that had
[1:23:28] attacked Mimi. Nine people were wounded in a
[1:23:32] separate incident in National City, and a 16 year old was cut
[1:23:36] down on Delta St. in San Diego. The pattern suggested a small
[1:23:40] group of shooters working through a list of perceived
[1:23:43] enemies or simply using a stretch of nights to assert
[1:23:46] their territory in the most violent way they knew how.
[1:23:50] If those shootings were connected, and many
[1:23:53] investigators have long suspected they were, then
[1:23:56] solving any one of them might have unlocked the others.
[1:24:00] Unfortunately, though, none of them have ever been closed, and
[1:24:03] at this point it's likely they won't be either by the.
[1:24:08] Time the Aurora police forced their.
[1:24:10] Way into a quiet townhouse on the afternoon of May 24th, 2004.
[1:24:15] The man responsible for the unspeakable acts inside had
[1:24:19] already been gone for at least a day.
[1:24:21] He'd slept in the owner's bed. He'd eaten food from the owner's
[1:24:25] kitchen. He'd taken a long shower to
[1:24:28] clean up before dumping bleach down the drain.
[1:24:31] He'd wiped all the surfaces he'd touched.
[1:24:33] And then, with no particular urgency, he drove the owner's
[1:24:38] pickup truck to a bank machine where he'd withdrawn exactly
[1:24:41] $1000. He then left the vehicle parked
[1:24:45] a block and a half away. That had been Sunday morning.
[1:24:49] Now it was Monday, and Albert Kite, 53 years old, had been
[1:24:55] dead in his own basement since the weekend before.
[1:24:59] Nobody knew who the man. Who did this?
[1:25:00] Horrific. Act was, and more than 20 years
[1:25:03] on, detectives are no closer to cracking this horrific unsolved
[1:25:08] true crime mystery. Al Kite had been.
[1:25:11] Born in the spring of. 1951, and he had, by every account, built
[1:25:16] the sort of life that ought to have ended in a rocking chair on
[1:25:19] a porch somewhere. A few decades later he was a
[1:25:22] project manager at a consulting and engineering firm in Denver,
[1:25:27] and his Co workers thought of him as steady, reliable and low
[1:25:31] drama. He was divorced about 3 years
[1:25:35] out of it by that May, and he was seeing a woman named Linda.
[1:25:40] He had a two-story townhouse in a suburban corner of Aurora, Co,
[1:25:45] the kind of neighborhood where most weekends play out quietly
[1:25:49] and crime wasn't on anyone's mind.
[1:25:52] The picture that emerges from interviews with the people who
[1:25:55] loved him is almost relentlessly gentle.
[1:25:59] Al was polite to strangers, and he did favors without being
[1:26:02] asked. He kept his yard up, paid his
[1:26:05] bills on time, and called his sister often.
[1:26:09] His girlfriend, Linda, who had known him only a relatively
[1:26:12] short while by that spring, would go on to describe him as
[1:26:16] warm, unguarded, and a little shy.
[1:26:21] He wasn't a man with enemies, and that's the piece the
[1:26:25] detectives have never been able to get past.
[1:26:28] Despite this fact, someone had chosen him, perhaps
[1:26:31] specifically, and had come to his house with a plan for
[1:26:34] complete annihilation to make use of the.
[1:26:38] Basement suite in his. Townhouse and pick up a little
[1:26:41] extra income. Al had been running a rental ad.
[1:26:45] There was a listing online and there was reportedly ads running
[1:26:48] in a local paper as well, as was the style at the time.
[1:26:53] Sometime around the middle of May 2004, he got a call from a
[1:26:58] man who introduced himself as Robert Cooper.
[1:27:01] Cooper said he'd just. Moved out from the east.
[1:27:03] Coast. He said he was starting a new
[1:27:05] position at Wells Fargo, and he said he needed a soft landing
[1:27:09] while he got settled. He was calm on the phone, and he
[1:27:12] showed up in person in a suit, which stuck out a little in AL's
[1:27:16] memory, though not enough to put him off.
[1:27:19] He thought he was just a bit formal.
[1:27:22] Cooper walked the basement, liked what he saw, and Al
[1:27:26] produced a rental application that Cooper filled out with the
[1:27:30] confidence of a man who'd done this kind of paperwork many
[1:27:33] times before. But here's the thing.
[1:27:37] None of what Robert Cooper wrote down was even remotely true.
[1:27:43] The address he put on the form when investigators later chased
[1:27:46] it down turned out to be an administrative building on the
[1:27:50] University of Colorado Medical Campus, the Social Security.
[1:27:55] Number belonged to a. Woman living somewhere else in
[1:27:57] the country who'd never heard of him.
[1:28:00] His alleged employer didn't know he existed, and his references
[1:28:04] were all invented from whole cloth.
[1:28:07] There was no Robert Cooper, at least not on any paper anywhere.
[1:28:11] The only real things about him were the face.
[1:28:13] A handful of witnesses would remember, and eventually a
[1:28:17] single drop of blood. Those witnesses described a
[1:28:21] white male, probably in his late 30s or early 40s, though some
[1:28:26] put him closer to his early 50s. He was around 5 foot 8 to 5 foot
[1:28:31] 10, solidly built, roughly 175 lbs, with dark, slightly curly
[1:28:38] hair. He walked with a.
[1:28:41] Limp and sometimes. Used a cane, but other times he
[1:28:44] didn't, indicating that this was all part of his persona.
[1:28:49] It also makes me wonder. If he was something of a.
[1:28:51] Film buff, or if he was perhaps a fan of the movie The Usual
[1:28:55] suspects some of the people who crossed.
[1:28:59] His path that. Month thought his accent was
[1:29:01] faintly off, as though he'd grown up somewhere in Eastern
[1:29:05] Europe. Romanian was the.
[1:29:08] Guest that came up most. Often.
[1:29:10] But others heard a plain old standard American accent.
[1:29:14] His mannerisms shifted from one encounter to the next.
[1:29:18] A different gate, a different cadence, different clothes.
[1:29:23] It's hard to tell in retrospect whether witnesses were seeing a
[1:29:26] single man who was good at shifting his personas or simply
[1:29:30] remembering the same person inconsistently.
[1:29:34] What is clear? Is that Cooper had.
[1:29:36] Been working at this for a while.
[1:29:38] Investigators would later trace a prepaid cell phone he'd
[1:29:42] purchased in the general area of the medical campus.
[1:29:45] That burner had been used to call a long list of rental
[1:29:49] listings around the Denver area, and AL's ad was one of several
[1:29:53] he'd responded to. He toured other properties,
[1:29:57] walked the rooms, eyed the windows and then politely
[1:30:00] declined. For reasons nobody can fully
[1:30:03] explain, Al Kite's basement was the one he came back to.
[1:30:08] Whatever his process was, it wasn't the process of a man in a
[1:30:12] hurry by any means. Some of the landlords in that.
[1:30:15] Window remembered. Later, that there'd been nothing
[1:30:18] overtly wrong with him. He showed up on time, he'd been
[1:30:22] dressed well, and he'd asked reasonable questions.
[1:30:26] And yet the common thread in their memories was a kind of
[1:30:29] quiet unease, the sense that something, though they couldn't
[1:30:33] articulate what, wasn't quite right with the mysterious Mr.
[1:30:37] Cooper on Saturday, May. 22nd. Al was confirmed to be alive and
[1:30:43] in good spirits at 3:30 in the afternoon.
[1:30:46] His girlfriend, Linda, had flown out of Denver earlier that day
[1:30:50] for a personal trip, and she called him from the airport
[1:30:53] around that time. The conversation was short and
[1:30:56] ordinary. She talked about the flight and
[1:30:59] he talked about the weekend ahead, and that was the last
[1:31:03] contact between them. Somewhere on that same Saturday,
[1:31:07] Robert Cooper came back to the townhouse on South Helena
[1:31:10] Street. He may have had an appointment,
[1:31:14] or he may have arrived unannounced, since investigators
[1:31:17] have never been able to reconstruct that moment with
[1:31:19] certainty. However, what they have been
[1:31:22] able to reconstruct is that Al seems to have let him in
[1:31:26] willingly and then for some reason let him down the basement
[1:31:30] stairs. Maybe.
[1:31:32] Cooper had asked. To see something.
[1:31:34] A fuse box, a water heater, a piece of furniture that was
[1:31:38] going to be included with the unit.
[1:31:41] Whatever the pretext. Al went down the stairs 1st and
[1:31:45] Cooper went down second. A mistake that would be fateful,
[1:31:50] as they were. Descending, Cooper struck.
[1:31:52] Al on the back of the head, and while it isn't clear if this was
[1:31:56] meant to finish him off for the reasons, you'll see, Cooper
[1:31:59] likely intentionally held back. The blow didn't take his life,
[1:32:04] probably as planned, but it disoriented him badly enough
[1:32:08] that Cooper could overpower him easily.
[1:32:11] The intruder had come prepared, carrying some cords and a truly
[1:32:15] disturbed plan for what to do with them.
[1:32:19] Now I'll be repeating this. A couple times over the.
[1:32:21] Next minute or two, but I'm going to try to only give an
[1:32:24] overview of what was done here without getting into the
[1:32:27] specifics. And while you can go and look up
[1:32:30] all the details yourself, I can say with absolute certainty that
[1:32:34] you'll be a happier and more fulfilled person for not having
[1:32:38] done so. Cooper Bound.
[1:32:41] AL's hands behind his. Back and he bound his ankles.
[1:32:45] Then he tied the ankles back to the wrist ligatures.
[1:32:49] Al was effectively folded into a hog tie on the basement floor.
[1:32:53] And then Cooper began doing what he'd apparently arrived to do.
[1:32:58] The details are grim. They don't need to be described
[1:33:01] at length to be understood. But what can be said is that Al
[1:33:05] suffered for hours before passing away, and I'll mostly
[1:33:09] leave it at that. Except there's one specific
[1:33:12] detail of what Al was put through that needs to be
[1:33:15] underlined pretty heavily, because it's a significant clue
[1:33:19] about the identity of the attacker.
[1:33:21] He'd been beaten on the soles of his feet, which, turns out, is a
[1:33:25] very specific form of punishment that has a long history in parts
[1:33:30] of the Middle East and Southeastern Europe.
[1:33:34] By the time it was over, hours had passed and then Cooper,
[1:33:38] instead of leaving, decided to make himself at home.
[1:33:43] This is one of the parts. Of the story that's.
[1:33:45] Kept investigators and profilers circling back for more than two
[1:33:49] decades because it says something particular about the
[1:33:52] kind of person they're hunting. Most people who do something
[1:33:56] like what Cooper did to Al Kite flee the scene in a panic.
[1:34:00] They want as much ground between themselves and the house as they
[1:34:03] can get, and they want it as fast as possible.
[1:34:07] Cooper, for his part, went. Upstairs.
[1:34:09] He ate food from AL's kitchen. He took a shower in the master
[1:34:13] bathroom. He slept in AL's bed.
[1:34:16] He wore pieces of AL's clothing. He handled the owner's
[1:34:20] possessions calmly and without haste, and at some point in the
[1:34:24] early hours of Sunday morning, he began to clean.
[1:34:28] The cleaning was methodical enough to suggest it had been
[1:34:31] planned well before any of it started.
[1:34:35] Cooper filled the. Kitchen sink with Clorox.
[1:34:37] Bleach and dropped between 6:00 and 12:00.
[1:34:40] Kitchen knives into it. He also dropped in the drinking
[1:34:43] glass he'd used a pen, a small cleaning scrubber, and AL's car
[1:34:48] keys. He poured more bleach down the
[1:34:51] shower drain where he had calmly washed himself after the events.
[1:34:56] He wiped down every surface he could think of, missing almost
[1:34:59] nothing whatsoever. He collected the rental
[1:35:03] application he'd filled out, the one with the fabricated identity
[1:35:07] and carried it out with him. When he eventually left, he
[1:35:11] moved through that. Townhouse the way A.
[1:35:13] Professional might move through a work site at the end of a long
[1:35:16] day early. On Sunday morning, May 20.
[1:35:20] Third, he drove AL's pickup truck to a nearby Wells Fargo
[1:35:24] branch, where he used a Dr. Thru bank machine.
[1:35:28] He was wearing a ski mask, gloves and a jacket.
[1:35:32] The cameras caught him anyway, though the mask covered
[1:35:35] everything below the upper cheeks.
[1:35:37] He used AL's debit card and withdrew exactly $1000, even
[1:35:42] though the account had more in it than that.
[1:35:45] Then he drove the truck back toward the townhouse, parked it
[1:35:48] roughly a block and a half down the road, and walked away.
[1:35:53] No fingerprints. Were left in the cab.
[1:35:56] And the ATM receipt was left on the front seat, like a receipt
[1:36:00] somebody might leave for a friend after borrowing their
[1:36:02] car. I should mention here that this
[1:36:05] is the man we believe to be Robert Cooper who was captured
[1:36:09] on the surveillance video. But it's a distinct possibility
[1:36:12] that this was actually an accomplice, perhaps someone sent
[1:36:16] in to muddy the waters of the investigation.
[1:36:19] That's just my own personal theory.
[1:36:21] There's no evidence to support it.
[1:36:24] But absolutely nothing about this case would shock me for
[1:36:28] about 30. Six hours the.
[1:36:30] House on South Helena Street held its secret, and Linda tried
[1:36:33] to reach out on Sunday and couldn't.
[1:36:37] She didn't want to assume the worst right away, and they
[1:36:39] hadn't been together all that long.
[1:36:42] There were plenty of ordinary explanations for why he may not
[1:36:45] have answered. He was outside.
[1:36:48] He was out on an errand, or perhaps he was in the middle of
[1:36:51] some project he hadn't mentioned.
[1:36:54] He may have even had a work emergency come up and maybe he
[1:36:57] had to go into the office to handle some business on a Sunday
[1:37:02] on Monday morning. May 20. 4th AL didn't show up at
[1:37:06] the Denver firm where he worked and he hadn't called in.
[1:37:10] That was deeply out of character for him and his Co workers tried
[1:37:13] his home phone, they tried his cell, and when the calls kept
[1:37:18] going unanswered, they contacted the Aurora Police Department.
[1:37:23] Officers arrived at the house in the afternoon to perform a
[1:37:26] welfare check and the outside looked ordinary.
[1:37:30] The front door was locked, the curtains drawn, and they cleared
[1:37:34] the main floor first. The kitchen smelled strongly of
[1:37:38] bleach and the sink full of submerged implements struck them
[1:37:41] as slightly unusual but not too far out of the ordinary.
[1:37:46] The bedroom was made-up but looked faintly disturbed, and
[1:37:49] the bathroom, too, had the sharp chemical smell of a place that
[1:37:53] had been heavily cleaned. Then they went to the basement.
[1:37:58] The lead investigator assigned to the case was a career Aurora
[1:38:02] detective named Tom Sabieski. He'd spent many years in the
[1:38:06] job, and he would say later on the record that what he saw at
[1:38:11] the bottom of those basement stairs was the worst thing he
[1:38:13] saw in his entire career. For a cop who'd been at it that
[1:38:17] long, that isn't a small thing to say.
[1:38:21] A coroner's team, crime scene technicians and federal agents
[1:38:25] joined the response over the next several hours, and the work
[1:38:29] of reconstructing what happened began.
[1:38:32] They would find an almost perfectly cleaned crime scene.
[1:38:36] But almost perfect and perfect are two distinctly different
[1:38:39] things Cooper had. Thought about almost everything.
[1:38:45] He'd chosen a target who was advertising publicly.
[1:38:48] He'd built a tower of false identity that folded back on
[1:38:51] itself at every step. A fictitious employer, a
[1:38:55] stranger's Social Security number, a fake address, a burner
[1:38:59] phone. Everything.
[1:39:01] He'd stayed in the home for hours after committing this
[1:39:04] series of disturbing acts to scrub the scene on his own
[1:39:07] schedule. He'd taken the truck to a bank
[1:39:10] machine and a mask and gloves and left the receipt in the cab.
[1:39:13] As if to underline how little leverage the evidence would
[1:39:16] offer or to send some unknown message.
[1:39:20] He'd dumped 2 cell phones afterward, the burner he'd used
[1:39:23] for the calls and AL's own phone in a fairly rough area of
[1:39:27] downtown Denver. He purposely dropped them in
[1:39:31] places where the phones would be picked up and handled before
[1:39:34] they were retrieved. What he missed was a single drop
[1:39:37] of blood on the basement stairs. And fortunately for
[1:39:41] investigators, it wasn't AL's genetic testing.
[1:39:46] Later established that the. Drop belonged to an unknown man,
[1:39:49] presumably Cooper himself. That Drop sat on the stair
[1:39:54] through the cleaning, somehow outlasting every other piece of
[1:39:57] physical evidence at the scene. And in the years since, it's
[1:40:01] been effectively the only piece of physical evidence from Robert
[1:40:05] Cooper's person that anyone associated with the
[1:40:08] investigation has ever actually held.
[1:40:12] In the weeks that followed, Aurora detectives and the FBI
[1:40:16] began working a handful of parallel threads.
[1:40:19] They pulled the burner phone records and worked the call log
[1:40:21] to find every landlord he had gone to see.
[1:40:25] They chased the rental application to its fake address
[1:40:27] at the University of Colorado to see if anyone recognized the
[1:40:31] man, but there they came up, completely empty.
[1:40:35] They cross referenced the description against Wells
[1:40:37] Fargo's actual new hire lists, which as expected, turned up no
[1:40:43] Robert Cooper, but the real breakthrough.
[1:40:46] Came from their work. Tracking down the landlords who
[1:40:49] had spoken with the mysterious man, one recalled Cooper
[1:40:53] examining the windows of a rental unit with an unusual
[1:40:56] level of attention. Another remembered him.
[1:40:59] As being still. And almost lifeless in a way
[1:41:03] that was hard to describe. A third said simply that she
[1:41:07] hadn't wanted to be alone with him in the house due to the
[1:41:10] uneasy feelings he gave her. Now I do have to mention the
[1:41:13] inherent weakness associated with these police interviews of
[1:41:17] the landlords. The landlords knew a truly
[1:41:20] horrific crime had been committed by this so-called
[1:41:23] Robert Cooper, which would make any previous interactions seem
[1:41:27] disconcerting in retrospect. But I digress.
[1:41:32] Investigators. Also noticed that.
[1:41:34] On at least a couple of occasions, Cooper had gone to
[1:41:37] some trouble to avoid being seen by Linda.
[1:41:40] Al had mentioned her and Cooper had adjusted his timing so that
[1:41:45] when she was likely to be around, he wasn't.
[1:41:49] Whether that was because? He feared being.
[1:41:51] Identified by a witness later or because there was some other
[1:41:55] reason is something that has eluded detectives despite.
[1:42:00] This case having long gone. Cold and despite there being few
[1:42:04] meaningful leads, the drop of blood and foot beating technique
[1:42:07] have done outsized work. In the late 2000s, a private lab
[1:42:12] in Virginia ran the sample through phenotyping tools that
[1:42:17] infer likely physical traits from genetic markers.
[1:42:21] The result pointed to a man with Eastern European ancestry, with
[1:42:26] roots plausibly traceable to Romania, Bulgaria or a
[1:42:30] neighboring country that lined up with the faint Eastern
[1:42:34] European accent At least one witness had reported hearing
[1:42:38] back in 2004. A composite image based on the
[1:42:42] genetic work was eventually released publicly, hoping to
[1:42:46] shake something loose, but as of yet, this hasn't led to a break
[1:42:50] in the case. Genetic genealogy has been
[1:42:54] applied to the sample as well, though the fact that the man may
[1:42:58] not have any close relatives in the United States could be a
[1:43:01] complicating factor. If he's from Europe, where there
[1:43:05] are different privacy laws at play with respect to genetic
[1:43:09] genealogy, it may be difficult to trace him.
[1:43:14] Another factor is that genetic testing simply isn't as popular
[1:43:18] in countries that aren't largely populated by the descendants of
[1:43:21] immigrants. The simple reason for this being
[1:43:24] that most people in Romania or Bulgaria, for instance, know
[1:43:29] their ancestry. And if they were from an ethnic
[1:43:32] community in those countries, perhaps like a Transylvanian
[1:43:35] German, they'd be well aware of that as well.
[1:43:38] They're simply not the same incentive to submit to a highly
[1:43:41] invasive genetic process for people from these countries.
[1:43:46] As for why the man? Known as Robert.
[1:43:48] Cooper did this to Al. There's honestly as many
[1:43:51] theories out there as there are people who have heard the story.
[1:43:55] There are some tenuous connections to other landlords
[1:43:58] that were attacked in a vaguely similar way, which has suggested
[1:44:02] to some that the intruder was a serial predator.
[1:44:05] However, no connections have ever been meaningfully
[1:44:08] confirmed, and something about the brutality of this case is
[1:44:11] just markedly different. Given the quite unspeakable acts
[1:44:16] he committed against Al, I suspect the truth about who
[1:44:19] Robert Cooper actually was is even darker than we'd suspect
[1:44:25] the case of. Al Kite is one of the most.
[1:44:27] Disturbing I've ever covered, and it's one that I'm hoping we
[1:44:30] see a resolution to in the near future.
[1:44:33] Robert Cooper, whoever he really was, would be somewhere in his
[1:44:38] 60s or 70s by now. If he's alive at all.
[1:44:42] He may be living quietly under another name in another town.
[1:44:46] He could be your neighbor, or he could be mine.
[1:44:50] Or perhaps he was already. On a flight by the.
[1:44:52] Time the police discovered AL's body never to return to North
[1:44:56] America again. On the afternoon of June 11th
[1:45:02] 1980, a man climbed to the top of a coal pile in Todd Morden,
[1:45:06] West Yorkshire, and found a body lying face up on the black
[1:45:10] stones. The man was middle-aged, dressed
[1:45:13] in a suit and missing his shirt. His wallet and watch were gone,
[1:45:18] his wedding ring absent from his finger and his hair had been
[1:45:22] cropped short in a way that didn't match how he'd looked a
[1:45:26] few days earlier. Strangest of all, despite having
[1:45:30] apparently spent some time lying on a slope of loose coal roughly
[1:45:34] 10 to 12 feet high, there wasn't a smudge of coal dust on him
[1:45:39] anywhere. No black streaks on the pants,
[1:45:42] no dirt under the fingernails. No disturbance in the pile
[1:45:46] beneath him, as if he'd been placed on the summit by
[1:45:49] something that never actually touched the coal.
[1:45:53] The man on the pile was Sigmund Adamski, a 56 year old Polish
[1:45:57] born miner who'd last been seen by his wife five days earlier.
[1:46:02] Walking down the street to the local grocery store.
[1:46:06] The last thing anyone could say with any certainty was that he'd
[1:46:09] been in good health, sober, and on his way to pick up a few
[1:46:13] groceries before the family attended a wedding the next day.
[1:46:18] Five days after that errand, 20 miles from where he'd last been
[1:46:21] spotted, he was gone. And let's just say some people
[1:46:26] think this isn't your usual true crime style abduction case.
[1:46:30] Many people believe that. Adamski was.
[1:46:32] Abducted either by forces from outside this world or by shadowy
[1:46:36] intelligence agencies from the Eastern Bloc, Adamski.
[1:46:41] Was born in Poland in August. Of 1923 and came to Britain in
[1:46:45] the 1940s, where he eventually built a life for himself in the
[1:46:49] mining country of West Yorkshire.
[1:46:52] Britain took in a large population of Polish servicemen
[1:46:55] and civilians who'd ended up on the wrong side of the Iron
[1:46:59] Curtain. When the fighting stopped, many
[1:47:02] of them, despite having fought for their country, had no
[1:47:05] realistic prospect of returning to their homeland without facing
[1:47:10] persecution by 19. 80 Adamski was.
[1:47:14] Living with his wife Lottie, at a modest house on Thornfield
[1:47:17] Crescent in Tingley, a small village sandwiched between Leeds
[1:47:21] and Wakefield, she'd been suffering from multiple
[1:47:25] sclerosis for years by that point, which meant Adamski's
[1:47:28] domestic life was organized around her care as much as
[1:47:31] around his own routine. He was, by every account that
[1:47:35] survives, unremarkable in the best possible sense.
[1:47:40] Friends called him Ziggy, and neighbors described him as
[1:47:43] steady, polite and fond of tending his garden.
[1:47:48] He and Lottie had been married for decades, and although the
[1:47:51] couple didn't have children of their own, Adamski was close to
[1:47:55] his extended family on the. Afternoon of June 6th, 19. 80
[1:48:01] Adamski told Lottie he was going to shop for potatoes, which
[1:48:05] tracks because honestly, Polish people absolutely love their
[1:48:08] potatoes. He put on a jacket, stepped
[1:48:12] through the front door sometime around 3:30 and turned onto the
[1:48:16] road that led into the village. According to accounts, he
[1:48:21] stopped briefly on the way to greet a neighbor, exchanged a
[1:48:24] few words and carried on walking.
[1:48:28] That was the last. Confirmed sighting anyone?
[1:48:30] Would have of him. He didn't come back that
[1:48:33] evening. By nightfall, Lottie was pacing
[1:48:36] the house, and by the time the hour grew late, she'd called the
[1:48:39] police. Her initial fear wasn't illness
[1:48:43] or confusion or an accident on the road.
[1:48:46] She reportedly told officers that she suspected he'd been
[1:48:49] abducted. Why she jumped to that
[1:48:51] conclusion so quickly has never been fully explained in the
[1:48:55] public record, but it's worth sitting with for a moment.
[1:48:59] A woman whose husband had lived in Britain for decades in a
[1:49:03] quiet village where nothing much ever happened, immediately
[1:49:06] assumed the worst possible scenario, whatever she knew
[1:49:11] about. Her husband.
[1:49:12] Or feared about the world he moved through.
[1:49:15] She wasn't treating this as a case of a middle-aged man
[1:49:18] wandering off to clear his head. West Yorkshire Police opened an
[1:49:22] investigation but they came up with absolutely nothing for four
[1:49:28] full days. Adamski had effectively stepped
[1:49:30] off the edge of the map on June 11th.
[1:49:34] Five days after. Adamski walked out for those
[1:49:36] potatoes. A man named Trevor Parker
[1:49:39] climbed up a pile of coal at his father's yard near the train
[1:49:42] station in Todd Morden. Todd Morden sits in the Calder
[1:49:46] Valley, on the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire, about
[1:49:50] 20 miles West of Tingley. It's a milltown tucked between
[1:49:55] steep green hills, notable for very little in 1980, except that
[1:50:00] within months it would become one of the most heavily
[1:50:02] documented UFO hotspots in British history.
[1:50:06] But on that particular afternoon, in the fading warmth
[1:50:10] of early June, Parker was just doing his job.
[1:50:14] Shortly before 4:00 in the afternoon, he spotted something
[1:50:18] on the peak of the pile that didn't belong.
[1:50:21] When he got close enough to make out what he was looking at, he
[1:50:25] found a damsky, his eyes open and his face set in what
[1:50:29] witnesses at the scene would later describe as an expression
[1:50:33] of terror. Parker called the police and a
[1:50:37] constable named Alan Godfrey arrived and became the first
[1:50:40] officer to examine the body. And trust me.
[1:50:44] You're going to want to remember.
[1:50:45] This officer's name because he'll play a big role in the
[1:50:49] more unusual developments. In this case, what Constable
[1:50:52] Godfrey found was a body laying on the loose coal near the top
[1:50:56] of the heap. And Simply put, nothing about
[1:50:58] the scene made rational sense. The pile sloped sharply on all
[1:51:03] sides, the kind of surface a living person can't climb
[1:51:06] without shifting the stones and leaving tracks behind them.
[1:51:10] But there were no tracks, and there were no scuffs in the
[1:51:13] coal. There were no footprints leading
[1:51:16] up or down, no sign of any person or vehicle having
[1:51:20] approached the pile recently, and no disturbance in the
[1:51:24] material beneath or around the body.
[1:51:27] Adamski hadn't. Climbed up under his.
[1:51:29] Own power, and nobody had carried him up there in any
[1:51:33] ordinary way. That left an ordinary mark the
[1:51:37] details. Didn't stop being strange.
[1:51:39] Once the body was moved to the Mortuary, Adamski was wearing
[1:51:43] the suit he'd left home in, but his shirt was gone.
[1:51:47] His wallet, his watch, and his wedding ring we're all missing.
[1:51:51] His shoes were tied correctly, but his pants and jacket were
[1:51:55] fastened wrong, as though someone unfamiliar with his
[1:51:58] particular clothing had dressed him again in a hurry.
[1:52:02] His hair, which had been worn longer when he'd left home, had
[1:52:06] been cut short and roughly, as if someone had taken a pair of
[1:52:10] blunt shears to it and hadn't cared how the result looked.
[1:52:15] Despite having been missing for five days, he'd only grown about
[1:52:19] one day's worth of stubble, suggesting he or someone else
[1:52:22] had shaved his face. His skin was largely clean, and
[1:52:25] there was no coal dust on him anywhere.
[1:52:27] Not on the suit, not in his hair, not under his nails.
[1:52:33] Adamski had a series of burn marks across the back of his
[1:52:36] neck and the tops of his shoulders, with smaller marks on
[1:52:40] his head. The burns didn't look fresh, and
[1:52:43] a forensic examination estimated that they were roughly 48 hours
[1:52:48] old at the time of death. This means whatever.
[1:52:51] Process caused them. Had happened a full 2 days
[1:52:54] before he ended up in the yard covering those burns.
[1:52:58] Was the substance. No one could identify a greasy
[1:53:02] ointment or gel that had been spread across the wounds in a
[1:53:05] way that strongly suggested someone had tried to treat them.
[1:53:09] Samples of the ointment. Were sent to the home.
[1:53:12] Office forensic laboratory. But the results came back
[1:53:15] inconclusive. The substance didn't match any
[1:53:19] standard burn treatment available in a pharmacy, any
[1:53:22] industrial chemical the lab had on file, or any common household
[1:53:27] preparation anyone could think of.
[1:53:30] The post mortem was. Carried out by doctor.
[1:53:32] Alan Edwards, a pathologist at the Royal Halifax Infirmary.
[1:53:36] Edwards determined that Adamski had perished sometime between
[1:53:40] 11:00 in the morning and 1:00 in the afternoon on June 11th.
[1:53:45] This placed his death. Within hours of the.
[1:53:47] Body being found on the heap and the official medical cause was
[1:53:51] listed as a heart attack. There was no trauma.
[1:53:54] Consistent with a. Beating no wounds that could
[1:53:57] account for his sudden passing and no signs of starvation or
[1:54:01] dehydration during those missing days, the inquest was presided.
[1:54:06] Over by the West. Yorkshire Coroner James
[1:54:08] Turnbull. Turnbull took the case
[1:54:11] seriously, and he heard from the pathologist, from Constable
[1:54:15] Godfrey, from Ladi Adamski, from the Coal Yard staff and from
[1:54:21] forensic experts who'd examined him after several months of.
[1:54:25] Deliberation. He returned an open verdict
[1:54:29] which was essentially a formal acknowledgement that while he
[1:54:31] died from a heart attack, the circumstances were unexplained.
[1:54:36] Turnbull would later. Tell journalists that the.
[1:54:39] Adamski case was the single strangest matter he'd
[1:54:42] encountered in his career, he said.
[1:54:45] The question of. Where the man had been.
[1:54:46] During those five days and what had been done to him while he
[1:54:50] was missing was a question he simply couldn't answer with any
[1:54:54] confidence. The case.
[1:54:58] Might have faded into the footnotes.
[1:54:59] Of British missing persons history if it had ended at the
[1:55:03] inquest. But about 5 months after
[1:55:05] Adamski's body was found, the officer who'd examined him at
[1:55:09] the coal yard had an experience of his own that dragged the
[1:55:13] whole story into another dimension entirely.
[1:55:17] On the morning of November 28th, 1980, Alan Godfrey was on duty
[1:55:22] and Todd Morton driving alone in a marked police vehicle.
[1:55:26] Shortly after five in the morning, he was reportedly
[1:55:30] looking for a small herd of cows that had been reported loose
[1:55:33] from a farm, the kind of errand rural officers in the north of
[1:55:37] England get pulled into on quiet shifts.
[1:55:41] What he said. He saw instead was a.
[1:55:43] Large diamond shaped object hovering above Burnley Road
[1:55:47] ahead of him, rotating slowly, glowing and sitting roughly 5
[1:55:53] feet off the road. He initially thought it was a
[1:55:56] bus, but when he got closer he realized the object didn't have
[1:56:01] wheels. Godfrey attempted to.
[1:56:04] Radio in the sighting. But his car radio and his
[1:56:07] personal handset both failed. He reached for his clipboard to
[1:56:12] sketch the object, and according to his own account, the next
[1:56:16] thing he was aware of was driving his vehicle further down
[1:56:18] the road. He had absolutely no memory of
[1:56:21] how he'd traveled that stretch, nor what period of time had
[1:56:25] passed. Estimates taken later placed the
[1:56:28] gap at somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes, and Godfrey himself
[1:56:33] sometimes described it as longer still.
[1:56:37] In fact, it wasn't. Until he was back.
[1:56:39] At the station that he realized he'd returned much later than he
[1:56:42] should have. To make matters more bizarre, a
[1:56:46] driver on the same Rd. roughly 3 miles further on reported seeing
[1:56:50] a bright white object at a time that matched his when officers.
[1:56:55] Returned to the spot where the. Object had hovered.
[1:56:57] They found an oddly dried, swirled patch of roadway in an
[1:57:01] area that was otherwise soaked with rain.
[1:57:04] The cows Godfrey had been looking for turned up at sunrise
[1:57:08] in a rain drenched field, allegedly with no hoof prints in
[1:57:12] the mud to explain how they'd got there.
[1:57:15] Godfrey's police issue boots, sturdy service grade leather,
[1:57:19] were split along the soles as if he'd been dragged across
[1:57:22] something rough under hypnosis. Arranged later as.
[1:57:26] Part of an independent investigation into the incident,
[1:57:29] he reportedly described being taken into a strange room.
[1:57:33] There he reportedly encountered a tall, bearded figure alongside
[1:57:37] several small mechanical looking beings.
[1:57:40] He compared to robots. There was no physical.
[1:57:43] Evidence to confirm. Any of it beyond the marks
[1:57:46] already noted and a faint red mark that appeared on his foot.
[1:57:50] Godfrey has stood by his account consistently in the decades
[1:57:54] since, giving interviews on television, on the radio and in
[1:57:58] print. The press coverage damaged his
[1:58:02] career significantly, and by 1981 he'd been pushed out of the
[1:58:06] West Yorkshire Police on grounds officially unrelated to the
[1:58:10] sighting itself. However, it was generally
[1:58:14] understood that his colleagues expressed concern that he had
[1:58:18] become a liability in light of this bizarre incident.
[1:58:23] He's maintained ever since that he saw what he saw, that
[1:58:26] something happened to him that morning that he can't explain.
[1:58:31] According to some theorists, this suggests that Adamski was
[1:58:35] also abducted in a similar way, though he wasn't so lucky. 4
[1:58:41] Broad. Explanations have circulated.
[1:58:42] About Adamski's death since 1980, and none of them accounts
[1:58:46] for every detail on the table. The 1st is an extraterrestrial
[1:58:50] abduction, which is the theory that made the case
[1:58:53] internationally famous. Its supporters point to the
[1:58:57] absence of cold disturbance around the body, the
[1:59:00] unidentified ointment and the unusual burns.
[1:59:04] They also note his sloppily cut hair, the missing beard growth,
[1:59:09] and the fact that Godfrey had his own apparent encounter less
[1:59:12] than half a mile from the coal yard.
[1:59:15] The second theory is far more grounded and far more mundane,
[1:59:19] suggesting foul play by a group of local men.
[1:59:23] Under this version, Adamski was grabbed shortly after leaving
[1:59:27] home and held somewhere for several days.
[1:59:31] During this time he was. Subjected to some.
[1:59:33] Form of assault that left him burned.
[1:59:37] He was then treated with whatever was on hand, but when
[1:59:41] his captors realized he was dying, he was then dumped.
[1:59:46] The problem with this? Theory is the absence of any.
[1:59:48] Suspects, any confessions, any witnesses or any forensic link
[1:59:54] to a specific location. There's also been no.
[1:59:58] Indication of any. Motive in the decades since
[2:00:01] since all indications are that amongst the locals he was well
[2:00:05] liked the third explanation. Is a theory involving.
[2:00:09] Eastern Bloc intelligence, and personally, it's the one that I
[2:00:12] prefer. Adamski was Polish, and Poland
[2:00:16] in June 1980 was a country on the edge of the Solidarity
[2:00:19] uprising that would detonate weeks later.
[2:00:22] A handful of writers have speculated that he had
[2:00:24] information, contacts or a past that made him of interest to the
[2:00:29] KGB or its allied services. They believe that his body.
[2:00:34] Was left as a. Message or as the result of a
[2:00:37] botched interrogation. That said, there's no evidence
[2:00:42] Adamski had any political involvement of that kind, and no
[2:00:46] declassified documentation has ever emerged to support it.
[2:00:51] However, the area had many Poles who very specifically didn't
[2:00:54] return to communist Poland and were actively interested in
[2:00:58] breaking the Soviet yoke. My personal speculative theory
[2:01:02] is that Eastern Bloc agents may have mistook Adamski for someone
[2:01:05] who was politically active and abducted him.
[2:01:09] Under this theory, I believe he may have suffered from a heart
[2:01:12] attack during the interrogation, and the agents then dumped his
[2:01:16] body in a manner that looked intentionally mysterious.
[2:01:20] This would provide some explanation of the unusual
[2:01:23] situation he was found in and why the evidence didn't make any
[2:01:27] sense. The fourth theory.
[2:01:29] Which surfaced in later. Decades after family
[2:01:32] conversations with independent investigators points to a
[2:01:35] domestic dispute. According to accounts published
[2:01:39] years later, a relative of the Adamski's had been experiencing
[2:01:43] marital troubles. Under this theory, Adamski had
[2:01:47] tried to intervene on behalf of one of the parties, and he was
[2:01:50] abducted in an attempt to persuade him to forget about the
[2:01:53] whole situation. That said, this theory
[2:01:58] essentially has absolutely no evidence to back it up, and
[2:02:02] there's no confirmation that Adamski had inserted himself in
[2:02:06] any familial dispute. In the end, what survives of
[2:02:11] Sigmund? Adamski, more than 4 decades
[2:02:13] later, is a coroner's open verdict and the memory of a
[2:02:17] middle-aged minor who walked out one afternoon.
[2:02:21] While his case has become somewhat legendary for its
[2:02:23] connection with extraterrestrials, ultimately
[2:02:27] this connection never would have happened without Godfrey's
[2:02:30] subsequent claims. In the end, I strongly suspect
[2:02:34] that foul play was involved, and I think the timing with the
[2:02:37] Solidarity uprisings in Poland is simply too convenient to be
[2:02:41] ignored. After all, the area where he
[2:02:45] lived was rich with anti communist Polish exiles, the
[2:02:49] exact sort of people who may have been supporting the
[2:02:51] movement from abroad. While there's nothing to suggest
[2:02:55] this is what Adamski was doing, he may have known people
[2:02:58] involved in the movement and this alone may have been enough
[2:03:01] for him to be targeted. Imagine you go out.
[2:03:05] For a jog 1. Morning, and the next thing you
[2:03:07] remember, you're floating face down in New York Harbor and
[2:03:11] nearly three weeks of your life are just gone.
[2:03:14] Not gone as in hazy or fuzzy around the edges, or hard to
[2:03:18] recall. Gone as in they never existed
[2:03:22] inside your head at all. That's what happened to.
[2:03:26] Hannah up in the late. Summer of 2008.
[2:03:29] And here's the thing it would happen two more times before she
[2:03:33] disappeared for good. Hannah was.
[2:03:36] By all available. Accounts an entirely normal 23
[2:03:40] year old woman. She'd graduated from Bryn Mawr
[2:03:43] College in 2007 with a double focus in Spanish and comparative
[2:03:47] Literature. She landed a job teaching middle
[2:03:50] school Spanish at Thurgood Marshall Academy in Harlem.
[2:03:54] She lived in Hamilton Heights, a neighborhood on the upper end of
[2:03:57] Manhattan, and was working toward a master's degree at Pace
[2:04:00] University on top of her full time teaching load.
[2:04:05] While her combined workload and university studies meant that
[2:04:08] she didn't have a lot of free time, she wasn't under any
[2:04:11] unusual stress and appeared to be handling life very well on
[2:04:16] the morning of August. 28th, 2:00. 1008 Hannah left her
[2:04:20] apartment to go for a run. She didn't take her wallet, her
[2:04:24] keys, her bank card, or any money.
[2:04:27] Her roommate reported her missing.
[2:04:28] After she failed to return, the NYPD opened a missing person's
[2:04:33] case and the story ran in local media.
[2:04:36] But despite the coverage and despite her photo being
[2:04:39] circulated, there were no immediate leads.
[2:04:42] For nearly three weeks, nobody knew where Hannah Up was, and
[2:04:47] there were absolutely no sightings of her.
[2:04:49] Surveillance footage later pulled from an Apple store in
[2:04:52] midtown Manhattan showed Hannah sitting at a display computer
[2:04:57] and logging into her Gmail account.
[2:05:00] She reportedly didn't respond to anyone around her and showed no
[2:05:03] signs of distress or confusion. She browsed the Internet, then
[2:05:07] stood up and walked out. Nobody at the store flagged
[2:05:11] anything unusual because from the outside, she looked like any
[2:05:15] other person checking her e-mail.
[2:05:18] That's the thing about. Dissociative Fugues.
[2:05:20] That makes it so unsettling, since the person experiencing it
[2:05:23] doesn't look lost or confused or in distress.
[2:05:27] But more on that in a moment. On September 16th, 2819, days
[2:05:33] after she'd gone for that jog, the crew of the Staten Island
[2:05:36] Ferry spotted a body floating face down in New York Harbor,
[2:05:40] near the southern tip of Manhattan.
[2:05:43] The deckhands initially assumed, not unreasonably, that she was
[2:05:47] dead, but thankfully she wasn't. Hannah was pulled from the water
[2:05:52] alive, severely dehydrated and hypothermic but breathing.
[2:05:58] She was rushed to hospital, where she eventually regained
[2:06:01] consciousness, and when asked what had happened, she
[2:06:05] reportedly had no idea. As far as her own memory was
[2:06:09] concerned, roughly 10 minutes had passed since she'd left for
[2:06:12] her run. 19 days of her life had simply ceased to exist.
[2:06:18] Doctors ran a battery of neurological and psychiatric
[2:06:21] tests, but there was no brain damage, no tumor, no sign of
[2:06:26] substance usage, and no head injury.
[2:06:30] The diagnosis they arrived at was dissociative fugue, a rare
[2:06:35] psychiatric condition in which a person temporarily loses access
[2:06:38] to their own autobiographical memory.
[2:06:41] Unusually, while in this state, the person suffering from the
[2:06:46] fugue retains the ability to function in the world in all
[2:06:49] other respects. To put that in plain terms, a
[2:06:53] person in a fugue state can walk, talk, ride the subway,
[2:06:58] check e-mail, and even hold brief conversations.
[2:07:03] What they can't do is. Remember who they?
[2:07:05] Are where they live or that anyone is looking for them
[2:07:10] psychiatrists who've. Studied dissociative.
[2:07:12] Disorders have a working hypothesis for how this actually
[2:07:16] happens. Episodic memory, the kind that
[2:07:20] stores your life story, goes offline during these episodes.
[2:07:26] Procedural memory, the kind that lets you operate a computer or
[2:07:30] navigate a crowded city street, stays intact.
[2:07:34] The result is a person who looks normal from the outside but has
[2:07:37] no idea who they are. What makes Hannah?
[2:07:41] 'S case unusual. Even within the already unusual
[2:07:44] world of dissociative fugue is that the condition is almost
[2:07:48] always linked to severe psychological trauma.
[2:07:51] This is the kind of thing that generally effects soldiers or
[2:07:55] people who have been subjected to extreme personal situations,
[2:07:59] or who have experienced sudden, devastating personal loss.
[2:08:03] In Hannah's case, extensive therapy, including hypnotherapy,
[2:08:09] reportedly turned up nothing unusual that could have
[2:08:11] triggered this response. The fugue seemingly came from
[2:08:16] nowhere, which made it far harder to treat and almost
[2:08:19] impossible to predict by two. 1013.
[2:08:25] Hannah had left New York and was working as a teaching assistant
[2:08:28] at a Montessori school in the Kensington area of Maryland.
[2:08:32] She was reportedly managing her condition and getting on with
[2:08:36] her life after that initial unpleasant episode.
[2:08:40] Then on September 3rd, 2013, Hannah disappeared near the
[2:08:44] intersection of Kemp Mill Road and Glen Allen Ave. just before
[2:08:49] 8:00 in the morning. She never showed up at the
[2:08:52] school, and two days later, on September 5th, she called her
[2:08:56] mother from the Wheaton Glenmont area of Maryland.
[2:09:00] She'd apparently woken up in a Creek, disoriented, with no
[2:09:04] memory of the preceding days once again.
[2:09:08] Hannah described the. Experience, as though only about
[2:09:11] 10 minutes had elapsed, and once again she had came to her senses
[2:09:15] in the water. She was found safe, physically
[2:09:18] unharmed, and was treated and released, and the diagnosis once
[2:09:22] again was dissociative fugue. This second episode confirmed a
[2:09:27] pattern that was, from a medical perspective, deeply concerning.
[2:09:32] Dissociative fugue episodes are supposed to be extraordinarily
[2:09:36] rare, and recurrence is rarer still.
[2:09:40] The fact that Hannah had now experienced 2 episodes separated
[2:09:44] by five years suggested that whatever was happening inside
[2:09:48] her mind may happen again. It was chronic and it could be
[2:09:53] triggered again without warning, and there was no reliable way to
[2:09:56] prevent it. At some point after the Maryland
[2:10:01] episode, Hannah relocated to Saint Thomas in the US Virgin
[2:10:04] Islands. She took a teaching position at
[2:10:08] the Virgin Islands Montessori School and International
[2:10:11] Academy, where she reportedly thrived.
[2:10:14] By all accounts, it was a clean break, an ocean between her and
[2:10:18] the places where she'd previously vanished.
[2:10:22] Whether this was a deliberate. Attempt to put.
[2:10:24] Distance between herself and her condition, or simply a career
[2:10:27] move that happened to take her somewhere warm and far away
[2:10:31] isn't entirely clear. What is clear is that in early
[2:10:36] September 2017, the Caribbean was hit by one of the most
[2:10:40] destructive hurricanes in recorded history.
[2:10:44] Hurricane Irma struck St. Thomas on September 6th, 2017,
[2:10:49] causing catastrophic damage across the island.
[2:10:53] Power was knocked out. Across most of the.
[2:10:55] Island buildings were flattened, roads were blocked with debris
[2:10:59] and the infrastructure that held daily life together was torn
[2:11:02] apart. Communications were down, normal
[2:11:06] routine ceased to exist and the island was in complete chaos on
[2:11:12] September. 14th, 2000. 17 Just eight days after Irma had passed
[2:11:17] through, Hannah left her home around 8:00 in the morning.
[2:11:21] She told people she intended to go swimming at Sapphire Beach
[2:11:25] and then stop by the school to take care of some tasks the next
[2:11:30] morning. September 15th.
[2:11:32] A construction cleanup crew found Hannah's sun dress,
[2:11:35] sandals and car keys laid out on the sand near Sapphire Beach.
[2:11:40] Her car was parked not far away, and inside the vehicle,
[2:11:44] investigators found her purse, her phone, her passport and her
[2:11:49] credit cards. There was no sign of any foul
[2:11:52] play or any form of robbery. Everything was untouched, as if
[2:11:57] she had just walked off. Hannah.
[2:12:00] UP has not been seen or heard. From since September 14th, 2017.
[2:12:06] Her mother flew to Saint Thomas on a one way ticket on November
[2:12:09] 20th of that year and she reportedly had no intention of
[2:12:14] leaving until her daughter was found.
[2:12:17] She created a Find Hannah Up page on Facebook and began
[2:12:21] coordinating search efforts with local volunteers and anyone
[2:12:25] willing to help. Searches were conducted on land
[2:12:29] and by sea with the help of local volunteers and emergency
[2:12:33] personnel, but the aftermath of. Hurricane Irma.
[2:12:38] Compounded by Hurricane Maria, which struck the region just
[2:12:41] days after Hannah vanished, made any kind of systematic effort
[2:12:45] extraordinarily difficult. The timeline here is important.
[2:12:50] Irma hit on September 6th, Hannah vanished on September
[2:12:54] 14th, and then Maria struck on September 20th.
[2:12:57] Just six days later. The island was being hammered by
[2:13:01] back-to-back catastrophic storms, and in that kind of
[2:13:04] environment, finding 1 missing person was close to impossible.
[2:13:11] There are effectively two ways to interpret what.
[2:13:13] Happened to Hannah on that beach in September 2017.
[2:13:17] The 1st is that she entered another fugue state, walked into
[2:13:21] the water and drowned. If her previous episodes are any
[2:13:26] indication, she would have had no awareness of what she was
[2:13:30] doing and no sense of danger. As I had previously mentioned,
[2:13:36] her two previous episodes involved her coming to her
[2:13:38] senses while she was in the water.
[2:13:42] If she entered the ocean off Sapphire Beach while she was in
[2:13:45] a fugue state, she may have simply been carried out into the
[2:13:48] open ocean, never to be found. The second possibility, which
[2:13:54] seemed. Potentially possible at the time
[2:13:57] is that Hannah entered A fugue state and walked away, as she'd
[2:14:00] done twice before. Under this theory, in a
[2:14:04] community where normal systems of identification and
[2:14:07] surveillance had been knocked offline, Hannah may have been
[2:14:11] taking refuge, not knowing who she was.
[2:14:15] This was the possibility Hannah's mother clung to
[2:14:18] initially, and it isn't entirely irrational.
[2:14:22] In 2008, Hannah survived 19 days wandering New York City without
[2:14:27] money, identification, or any apparent sense of self
[2:14:31] preservation, and she'd come out the other side alive.
[2:14:35] And in 2013, she'd done it again, though admittedly for a
[2:14:40] much shorter period of time, if she could manage that.
[2:14:43] In Manhattan and in. Maryland, the argument went, she
[2:14:47] could manage it in the disorganized aftermath of a
[2:14:50] hurricane. This theory, of course, faded
[2:14:54] from. Possibility over the years and
[2:14:56] the fundamental problem is the water.
[2:14:59] In New York, Hannah ended up in the harbor, and in Maryland she
[2:15:05] woke up in a Creek. There seems to be.
[2:15:08] Something about water. Whether drawn to it or simply
[2:15:12] drifting toward it, that's present in every episode.
[2:15:16] And the third time the water she reportedly wandered toward was
[2:15:21] the Caribbean Sea in the wake of a Category 5 hurricane, with
[2:15:26] another major hurricane on the way.
[2:15:29] One of the things that. Really gets me about Hannah.
[2:15:31] 'S story is that she did everything you'd expect a
[2:15:34] responsible person to do. She sought treatment after the
[2:15:38] first episode. She went to therapy, even tried
[2:15:42] hypnotherapy and took the condition seriously, but none of
[2:15:46] it was enough, the fugue states. Came anyway.
[2:15:50] And in a pattern that escalated from survivable to likely fatal,
[2:15:55] as of today, Hannah Up remains officially missing, with her
[2:16:00] family hanging on to the faintest hope that she may
[2:16:02] somehow still be alive.

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