# Four Cases So Disturbing… They Defy Logic | 215

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 27 Apr 2026, 51 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO9106621219.mp3

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## Transcript

[0:00] She smiled and waved at her companion on the Ridge, and
[0:03] then, in the space of the time it takes to boil a pot of water,
[0:07] Monica Reza simply wasn't there anymore. 5 minutes.
[0:12] That's the gap between the last photograph of her descending
[0:15] Mount Waterman and the moment her companion turned around to
[0:18] find an empty trail behind him. There was no sound and no
[0:23] footprints leading away from the path, and nobody can explain how
[0:27] it happened. The morning of June 22nd, 2025
[0:32] was, by every account, a normal 1.
[0:35] Monica had recently scaled back her work in material science and
[0:39] was spending more time on the things she loved.
[0:42] That morning, she joined two friends from her yoga community,
[0:47] a man and a woman who shared her interest in Vedic philosophy in
[0:50] the outdoors, for a route up Mount Waterman.
[0:54] The trailhead sits off Angeles Crest Highway, about an hour
[0:58] north of Los Angeles. It's a popular Sunday outing for
[1:02] hikers in Southern California who enjoy a fairly steep climb
[1:06] without committing to a full Backcountry expedition.
[1:10] The trail runs through the San Gabriel Mountains, and Mount
[1:13] Waterman tops out around 8000 feet.
[1:17] The group reached the summit and started down the West Ridge,
[1:20] according to the timeline that investigators later
[1:23] reconstructed using photo metadata.
[1:26] The descent was clipping along at a quick pace.
[1:29] From the peak, the trio covered a mile to their last group photo
[1:33] in 17 minutes. Then, in another 5 minutes or
[1:37] so, they pushed about 1/3 of a mile farther to a turn in the
[1:41] Ridge. At that turn, the lead hiker,
[1:45] the male companion, says he called back to Reza to flag the
[1:49] change in direction of the path. He claims she acknowledged him
[1:53] with a wave, and he says she was about 30 feet behind, smiling.
[1:58] Then he turned forward and kept walking.
[2:01] But when he glanced back a short while later, the trail was
[2:05] empty. What happened next is where the
[2:08] case starts to feel less like an accident and more like a Riddle.
[2:13] The companion told investigators that he then began running on
[2:16] the terrain to find her, which is itself unusual.
[2:21] The section of Ridge in question is steep and uneven, the kind of
[2:25] footing where running invites a broken ankle.
[2:28] He called out while running and got no response before he
[2:30] flagged down help. To understand why Monica Ray's
[2:35] disappearance attracted federal attention, you have to step back
[2:39] from the trail and look at what she'd spent her professional
[2:41] life doing. Monica was a metallurgist, and
[2:45] she'd worked at Rocketdyne, the legacy rocket engine outfit
[2:49] that's now folded into Aerojet Rocketdyne.
[2:53] She'd also worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
[2:56] Pasadena, where she'd risen to director of materials
[3:00] processing. Her professional profile at the
[3:03] time of her disappearance listed her as a fellow in the materials
[3:07] Science and Engineering department at Aerojet
[3:10] Rocketdyne. That's a senior technical role,
[3:14] and at her level it usually meant access to programs the
[3:17] public never hears about. In the mid 1990s she'd Co
[3:22] invented something called Monde Lloy, and while the name doesn't
[3:26] ring bells outside aerospace, inside that world it carries
[3:31] weight. Mondelez is a nickel based super
[3:34] alloy engineered to survive the obscene conditions inside a
[3:38] rocket engine, the temperatures and pressures that turn most
[3:42] metals into expensive sludge. It's the kind of material that
[3:47] lets American engineers build domestic engines competitive
[3:50] with the Russian RD180. This was the workhorse of a
[3:54] rocket engine that Moscow had been selling to America for
[3:57] decades. Aerospace engineers describe
[4:00] Monde Lloy as one of the keys to closing a long standing
[4:03] strategic gap. It helped end the dependency
[4:07] that left American National security launches, sourcing
[4:10] engines from a country the United States now considers an
[4:14] adversary. In other words, Monde Lloy is
[4:18] one of those quiet pieces of metallurgy that sits underneath
[4:22] national security policy without ever showing up in the
[4:25] headlines. For Monica Reza, she never
[4:29] expected to be the sort of person to capture headlines, and
[4:33] she likely never would have if she hadn't disappeared so
[4:37] mysteriously. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's
[4:41] Department's Crescenta Valley station took the lead.
[4:44] Within hours, search and rescue teams from across Southern
[4:48] California units from as far away as San Diego and Tulare
[4:52] County were converging on the Ridge.
[4:55] Helicopters worked the canyons, drones with thermal cameras
[4:59] swept the slopes, and dogs were brought in from multiple
[5:02] jurisdictions. The dogs, for their part, picked
[5:06] up something potentially the only meaningful physical
[5:09] evidence in the case. According to reports that
[5:13] surfaced during the operation, They followed what investigators
[5:17] believed was Monica's scent heading off the trail.
[5:21] That scent went into rough terrain on the Ridge and LED
[5:24] handlers to a hat that was thought to be hers.
[5:28] But after that, the trail thinned to nothing.
[5:32] Photo metadata gave investigators a fairly precise
[5:35] timeline up to a point, and then it went silent.
[5:39] There were no further images, no further pings, and no further
[5:43] confirmations of where Monica Reza was after roughly 910 that
[5:48] morning. The companions account is
[5:50] corroborated up to her apparent wave, but after that moment the
[5:55] record goes dark. The active search lasted roughly
[5:58] a week and by June 29th, 2025, with no remains, no clothing
[6:05] beyond that hat, no signs of a fall and no body, the large
[6:09] scale operation was wound down. That's the point at which a
[6:13] missing hiker case usually transitions to a quieter
[6:17] recovery footing. There are generally, in these
[6:20] cases, periodic checks by the authorities as well as family
[6:24] LED searches, but not much more. Monica Ray's case took a
[6:29] different turn when the sheriff's homicide Bureau picked
[6:32] it up. That move raised eyebrows
[6:35] because these sort of detectives don't generally inherit hiking
[6:38] accidents. They inherit cases where
[6:41] someone, somewhere suspects that a serious crime took place.
[6:47] If Monica Ray's disappearance had stayed a single tragic story
[6:51] on a single mountain, it might have faded by autumn.
[6:54] But instead it became one entry on a much longer Ledger.
[6:59] Over the following months, journalists and investigators
[7:03] began stitching together a list of American scientists and
[7:06] researchers who died or vanished under unusual circumstances.
[7:11] By the spring of 2026, House Oversight Committee Chairman
[7:15] James Comer had announced his committee would look into more
[7:18] than ten such cases. The White House was reportedly
[7:22] running its own quiet review at the same time, and Reyes name
[7:26] was on both lists. Some had worked on classified
[7:30] research while others had not, which only made the pattern
[7:34] harder to read. Some of the others were higher
[7:37] profile, such as Carl Grillmere, an astronomer at Caltech who
[7:42] reportedly died in circumstances that struck colleagues as out of
[7:45] character. Nuno Larrero, a fusion
[7:49] researcher at MIT, also turned up among the deaths under
[7:53] scrutiny. And then there was William
[7:56] Mccasland, who I've previously covered.
[7:59] But at that point, I didn't realize the potential actual
[8:03] connection to him and Monica. Reza Mccasland is a retired
[8:08] United States Air Force Major General, formerly the commander
[8:12] of the Air Force Research Laboratory.
[8:15] In February 2026, eight months after Reza vanished, he
[8:19] reportedly walked away from his home in Albuquerque, NM, and
[8:24] didn't come back. His disappearance triggered a
[8:27] New Mexico search that, like Reza's, has so far come up
[8:32] empty. The thread connecting Reza and
[8:35] Mccasland is, of all things, Mondeleoi, though it remains
[8:40] unclear if this is a simple coincidence or not.
[8:44] Monica Reza Co invented the alloy, and Mccasland, during his
[8:48] Air Force career, oversaw research programs that helped
[8:52] fund and shepherd the technology toward operational use.
[8:56] They were two figures with hands on the same piece of strategic
[9:00] metallurgy, and they were both gone in under a year.
[9:04] One lawmaker publicly floated the possibility that foreign
[9:07] adversaries such as China, Russia, or Iran might be
[9:12] involved. However, it's important to note
[9:14] that there's no actual evidence at this time to support any
[9:17] connection between these two disappearances.
[9:21] That said, the pattern is unusual enough to land Monica
[9:25] Ray's name in a federal probe rather than a county cold case
[9:29] binder. It's worth being careful here,
[9:33] because cases like this attract a lot of theorizing.
[9:37] What's solid is straightforward enough.
[9:40] The time the place the witness account of a wave on a Ridge,
[9:45] the photo timestamps and the dog hit on the hat.
[9:49] There's also the matter of the failure of a week of well
[9:51] resourced searching to turn up anything else whatsoever.
[9:56] What's softer, at least in terms of the public record, is the
[10:00] male companions account of what exactly happened that morning.
[10:04] Investigators haven't publicly named a suspect, and they
[10:08] haven't publicly cleared anyone either.
[10:12] The Sheriff's Department has by all accounts declined to discuss
[10:16] the file in detail, which is normal for an open investigation
[10:20] but also keeps the public picture incomplete.
[10:24] The fact that as of late April 2026, her case is now subject to
[10:28] a federal probe with national security implications will
[10:31] likely mean the Sheriff's Department won't be releasing
[10:34] new information. For now, the case file at the
[10:37] Crescenta Valley Sheriff's Station remains open and Monica
[10:41] Reza is still officially listed as a missing person.
[10:48] On November 5th, 2008, a utility crew was digging out an old
[10:52] power pole on a quiet block in Oklahoma City when they
[10:56] uncovered what was left of a young woman.
[10:59] She had no identification, no match in any missing persons
[11:03] database, and no one officially looking for her.
[11:08] The only thing she still wore was a pair of black slip on
[11:11] shoes and it would take another 18 years before anyone knew who
[11:15] she was. Amy Davis was born on May 2nd,
[11:19] 1988 and soon after she was adopted by a family in Oklahoma
[11:24] under what her biological relatives had been told was a
[11:27] closed adoption. As far as her birth family knew,
[11:31] that door to what she was doing had been bolted shut and they
[11:35] assumed Amy was out there somewhere growing up with people
[11:39] they'd never meet. Amy did grow up in Oklahoma, but
[11:43] by her late teens, things had clearly started to come apart.
[11:48] At 18, she ran away from her adoptive home, and she drifted
[11:52] toward Oklahoma City, and according to accounts pieced
[11:55] together, she ended up working the streets.
[12:00] She was struggling with addiction, and her life in that
[12:03] period was chaotic and mostly undocumented by anyone.
[12:07] By the summer of 2008, she was 20 years old and living on the
[12:11] margins of society. Her adoptive parents hadn't
[12:15] walked away from her, and when she dropped out of contact in
[12:19] the summer of 2008, they did what any worried parent would
[12:23] do. They went to the police station
[12:26] to report their adult daughter missing, and the police there
[12:29] still wouldn't take the report. The reasoning wasn't
[12:33] complicated, even if it was bleak and disturbing.
[12:38] Amy was a legal adult and they told her family that because she
[12:41] was known to be involved in certain work and that she used
[12:45] drugs, they simply wouldn't consider her missing.
[12:49] And no, you don't have to rewind there to make sure you heard
[12:52] that correctly. The cops accepted that she was
[12:55] factually missing, but they said that given that she was living
[12:59] on the margins of society, they wouldn't open an investigation.
[13:03] Now, usually I suspect that this is what happens behind the
[13:06] scenes, but it seems to me that the cops just said the quiet
[13:10] part out loud this time. So despite having filed a report
[13:14] while Amy was likely still alive, there was no one looking
[13:17] for her. Amy was last thought to have
[13:20] been seen alive around June 11th, 2008, somewhere in Edmond,
[13:26] just north of Oklahoma City. What she was doing that day, who
[13:30] she was with, and where she was headed are details that have
[13:34] never been publicly pinned down. For about 5 months after that
[13:39] summer, no one knew where she was.
[13:43] And then for another 18 years, nobody outside her adoptive
[13:47] household would realize she was gone.
[13:52] On November 5th, 2008, an electric company crew was
[13:56] working the 300 block of SW 10th St. in Oklahoma City.
[14:01] They were replacing an old power pole, ordinary utility work that
[14:05] nobody takes a second glance at. But while digging around the
[14:09] base of the old pole, they uncovered human remains.
[14:13] What they pulled out of the ground was mostly skeletal.
[14:17] There was no identification on or around the remains, no
[14:21] jewelry, and no obvious personal effects to pair a face with a
[14:25] name. The only item recovered with her
[14:28] was a pair of black slip on shoes branded Croft and Barrow,
[14:33] a mid range department store brand.
[14:36] It's the sort of detail investigators quietly log into a
[14:39] file, already knowing it isn't going to lead anywhere.
[14:43] Or perhaps I'm just being overly cynical at the moment.
[14:47] The medical examiner's office determined the remains belong to
[14:50] a young woman, likely between 18 and 23 years old.
[14:55] She was roughly 5 foot three with features consistent with
[14:58] Native American ancestry, and her cause of death was listed as
[15:02] undetermined, though she was presumed to have met with foul
[15:05] play. The Oklahoma City police
[15:09] departments kept the file active, and by 2011 it was
[15:13] already being handled as a possible slaying rather than a
[15:16] case of exposure or an overdose. That same year, a forensic
[15:22] artist created a three-dimensional reconstruction
[15:25] of what investigators believed the young woman's face might
[15:29] have looked like in life. The image went out through cold
[15:33] case databases, unidentified persons networks, and online
[15:37] forums aimed at anyone who might recognize her, but none of it
[15:41] produced an answer. And if you're one of those
[15:44] people who just listens, I encourage you to take a look at
[15:47] the juxtaposition between Amy and the reconstruction.
[15:52] To say this looked absolutely nothing like her, perhaps beyond
[15:55] the color of her hair, would be an understatement.
[15:59] And I realized these aren't supposed to be 1 to 1
[16:02] reconstructions, but I see absolutely no resemblance here.
[16:07] To compound matters, Amy's adoptive parents had never been
[16:10] able to get a report taken, so there was no paperwork in any
[16:14] database tied to her name. Her biological family, for their
[16:18] part, had no idea she was missing at all and still
[16:23] believed she was out there somewhere, living a life they
[16:26] simply weren't part of. In the meantime, the young woman
[16:31] from the 300 block of SW 10th St. stayed in the Oklahoma City
[16:36] Medical Examiner system as an anonymous Jane Doe case.
[16:42] Around 2018, the biological family finally caught a break of
[16:46] sorts, and they discovered that the closed adoption story they'd
[16:50] been fed wasn't actually accurate.
[16:53] There were records they could access and other avenues they
[16:56] could pursue. One of Amy's biological brothers
[17:00] took the first real step, reaching out through her
[17:03] adoptive family to try to connect.
[17:06] He had hoped to find a happy sister who had been raised by a
[17:09] loving family, but what he found was a concerned family who had
[17:13] no idea where Amy was. Amy had already been gone for a
[17:18] decade by that point, and as far as official records went, the
[17:22] case had never even existed. It took roughly another eight
[17:26] years for the rest of the pieces to line up, and when they did,
[17:30] Amy would get her name and identity back.
[17:33] In January of 2026, a biological cousin of Amy's, a woman in
[17:39] Virginia named Darlene Nixon, did what Amy's adoptive parents
[17:43] had tried and failed to do almost 18 years earlier.
[17:48] She walked into a police station and filed a missing persons
[17:51] report, and this time the report was accepted and it eventually
[17:56] reached the right database. Within about 3 months, a genetic
[18:00] sample from one of Amy's biological brothers was compared
[18:04] against the skeletal remains recovered back in 2008.
[18:08] The match came back in March of this year, and this Jane Doe
[18:12] finally had a name again. Her biological family, who'd
[18:16] spent years thinking she might still turn up on a doorstep
[18:19] somewhere, learned she'd actually been gone for most of
[18:22] her adult life. The identification of Amy Davis
[18:27] answers one mystery and opens a dozen more.
[18:30] We now know the name of the young woman pulled out of that
[18:32] Oklahoma City excavation site in 2008.
[18:36] We know her birthday, her adoptive family, her biological
[18:41] family, and the rough shape of the life she was leading in the
[18:44] weeks before she dropped out of contact.
[18:47] What we still don't know 18 years on, is pretty much
[18:52] everything that matters to an active investigation.
[18:56] The cause of death is still officially undetermined, though
[18:59] foul play is strongly suspected, especially considering the
[19:04] circumstances her body was found in.
[19:07] No suspect has been publicly named, and as of now it remains
[19:12] unclear who she was associating with at the time of her passing.
[19:17] The detectives now inheriting the file are effectively opening
[19:20] an inquiry on a scene that went cold 18 years ago, with a trail
[19:24] that was never really warm to begin with.
[19:28] Anyway. This case really pisses me off
[19:32] because I suspect that if the police had taken the initial
[19:35] report, Amy may still be with us today.
[19:40] I can only hope that the authorities will one day be able
[19:43] to close this case out fully and secure some measure of justice
[19:46] for Amy Davis. Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here,
[19:53] with my usual reminder to hit the subscribe button if you're
[19:56] enjoying the video. Also, don't forget to drop a
[19:59] comment saying what you're doing while you watch or where you're
[20:02] listening from, and be sure to check out the membership or the
[20:05] Patreon if you'd like to support my channel further.
[20:12] For about half an hour on a sunny stretch of Massachusetts
[20:14] Hwy. 2, postal employees stared down the barrels of weapons held
[20:19] by men dressed as police officers.
[20:22] By the time their truck was found abandoned 30 miles away,
[20:25] the postal workers were still tied up inside, and more than a
[20:29] million and a half dollars in untraceable bills was simply
[20:33] gone. It was the largest cash robbery
[20:36] in American history at the time, and the federal window to
[20:39] prosecute it slammed shut in 1967.
[20:43] Whoever pulled off this audacious heist almost certainly
[20:46] took the answer right to the grave.
[20:49] To give some context to this heist, I have to give some
[20:52] background on Cape Cod. In the summer of 1962, the Cape
[20:57] was booming, with tourists pouring money into restaurants,
[21:00] motels, marinas and gas stations.
[21:04] The small banks of Hyannis Born and the surrounding towns were
[21:08] ending every busy week, sitting on enormous piles of bills.
[21:12] That excess cash had to make its way back to the Federal Reserve
[21:16] Bank of Boston, and the route it took was almost charmingly old
[21:20] fashioned. Cape banks would bundle up their
[21:23] surplus, hand it over to the US Postal Service as registered
[21:27] mail, and trust that a regular postal truck would deliver it N
[21:31] up Route 3. There were no armored cars or
[21:34] escort vehicles, and the schedule wasn't exactly a state
[21:38] secret. The whole system ran on the
[21:41] quaint assumption that nobody would think to rob the male,
[21:45] since that would be a federal offense.
[21:48] And yeah, criminals hate that one simple trick where you just
[21:52] banned the crime from being committed.
[21:56] On the afternoon of August 14th, 1962, postal workers Patrick
[22:01] Sheena and William Barrett were running that route in a standard
[22:04] postal truck. Sheena, who was 36, had the
[22:08] wheel, and Barrett, who was 51, was riding along as the guard.
[22:14] Their cargo was around 1 and a half, $1,000,000 in small bills,
[22:18] bundled into sealed canvas sacks and stuffed in among the regular
[22:22] registered mail. They'd left the post office on
[22:26] Cape Cod, heading north, and both men had ridden this route
[22:30] countless times before. A few miles South of Plymouth,
[22:35] on a quiet, wooded stretch of Route 3, the truck rounded a
[22:38] bend and ran straight into what looked like a roadside
[22:41] emergency. A man dressed as a police
[22:44] officer was standing in the road waving them down, and he gave
[22:48] every impression that there'd been an accident up ahead.
[22:52] Sheena slowed and stopped, and the moment the truck came to
[22:55] rest, two more cars shot out from the side of the road and
[22:59] boxed it in. That's when the men in police
[23:02] uniforms produced weapons and Sheena and Barrett were ordered
[23:06] out, bound, gagged and shoved into the back of the truck.
[23:11] Among the mail sacks, 1 robber slid behind the wheel of the
[23:15] postal truck while the others took the chase vehicles and the
[23:19] small convoy simply pulled away. There wasn't any shouting, and
[23:23] not a single shot was fired. According to the accounts both
[23:28] postal workers gave investigators afterwards, the
[23:31] entire holdup felt almost surgical.
[23:34] The truck was driven N for roughly 30 miles, and at some
[23:38] point the registered cash sacks were transferred out of the
[23:41] postal truck and into vehicles the robbers had waiting.
[23:45] The truck itself was finally abandoned on Route 128 near the
[23:49] Randolph Cutoff, with Sheena and Barrett still tied up in the
[23:53] back. From there, the robbers had a
[23:55] clear shot S on Route 24 toward the towns where most of the
[23:59] local underworld lived and worked.
[24:02] By the time the postal workers freed themselves and flagged
[24:05] down help, their attackers had vanished into the rest of the
[24:09] state. The FBI and the US Postal
[24:13] Inspection Service made the case a top national priority
[24:16] overnight. At more than a million and a
[24:19] half in cash, it was the largest pure cash robbery in American
[24:23] history. To put this in context, this
[24:27] would be roughly the equivalent to having $16,000,000 stolen
[24:31] from a postal truck today, which sounds almost absurd.
[24:36] Agents flooded New England, interviewed thousands of
[24:39] witnesses, and leaned on every informant they had on the books.
[24:45] What jumped out immediately was how professional the whole thing
[24:48] felt. Since the robbers had clearly
[24:50] known the route, the schedule, and the contents of the truck,
[24:54] they'd known that the registered mail sacs contained unmarked
[24:58] bills bound for the Federal Reserve.
[25:01] They'd even staged A convincing enough roadside scene to fool
[25:04] veteran postal workers. They hadn't fired a shot or
[25:08] grabbed anything that wasn't an unmarked bill, and they'd barely
[25:12] left any physical evidence behind.
[25:15] This wasn't the work of amateurs, it was the work of
[25:18] experienced criminals. With someone close to the postal
[25:22] operation feeding them information.
[25:26] Suspicion landed quickly on the loose network of armed robbers
[25:29] and racketeers connected to the Patriarch, a crime family out of
[25:32] Providence. And for those familiar with
[25:35] organized crime in the region, I suspect you may have already
[25:39] guessed that these guys were at least suspected to be involved.
[25:43] One name in particular kept resurfacing in the FB is reports
[25:48] that was John Kelly, known as Red, a man with a long resume of
[25:53] meticulously planned scores and a reputation for staying clear
[25:58] of anything that would draw extra heat.
[26:01] He was known as a real professional, a guy who, despite
[26:04] his line of work, wasn't the sort of person to actually
[26:07] commit any truly violent acts. For Red Kelly, he was a mobster
[26:13] in the business of making money, not ending the lives of innocent
[26:16] people just doing their jobs. In fact, his reputation was so
[26:21] clean, all things considered, that fellow mobsters referred to
[26:25] him as Saint John. For nearly five years, the
[26:29] Bureau tried to build a courtroom case.
[26:31] As the federal statute of limitations ticked toward
[26:34] expiration, postal inspectors and federal agents leaned hard
[26:38] on every known armed robber in the Boston area.
[26:42] Kelly himself complained to a magazine reporter that the feds
[26:45] had harassed his wife. Worst of all, they had
[26:49] frightened his sweet, innocent Siamese cats, who definitely
[26:53] hadn't been involved in the planning stages and definitely
[26:56] weren't the true masterminds of the heist.
[26:59] Tips came in steadily and witnesses placed certain men at
[27:03] certain motels along the South Shore in the days leading up to
[27:07] the hold up. Others claimed they'd seen the
[27:10] vehicles used in the robbery being repainted afterward.
[27:14] There were also stories about cash turning up in unusual
[27:17] places and people coming into large sums of cash.
[27:21] But none of it quite added up to a prosecution.
[27:25] On July 30th, 1967, just 14 days before the federal statute of
[27:30] limitations was set to run out, a grand jury returned
[27:34] indictments against Kelly and two Co defendants.
[27:38] It was a last minute play and it didn't hold, and one of the
[27:42] defendants vanished before the trial even began and was never
[27:46] seen again. The remaining defendants were
[27:49] acquitted in court when witness identifications collapsed under
[27:53] cross examination and the physical evidence proved too
[27:57] thin to convince a jury. Once the verdict came down, the
[28:02] federal clock was already past midnight on the robbery itself,
[28:06] and the window to prosecute anyone for it slammed shut for
[28:09] good. Red Kelly, for his part, would
[28:13] eventually enter the federal witness protection program as a
[28:16] result of evidence he gave against the patriarch.
[28:19] A crime family boss. He would end up living into his
[28:23] 80s, passing away peacefully, A somewhat unusual end for someone
[28:28] so prominent in the organized crime world.
[28:31] Kelly, for his part, remained tight lipped about any alleged
[28:34] crimes that he committed during his life.
[28:38] Whoever those men were standing in the middle of Route 3 that
[28:41] August afternoon in 1962. They pulled off the cleanest
[28:45] large cash robbery in American history.
[28:48] They picked the right truck on a quiet Rd. during the right
[28:51] window of time when the country wasn't yet thinking about
[28:55] armored escorts for the United States Mail.
[28:59] And whoever they were, they got away with every single dollar of
[29:02] it. A search party had come to the
[29:08] empty house at the direction of the local constable.
[29:11] The word in the village was that the owner, a tinsmith who'd been
[29:15] gone at the front for nearly two years, had left behind a cache
[29:20] of industrial fuel or alcohol in the garden.
[29:23] The Austro Hungarian army was short on fuel, as it was short
[29:28] on almost everything at that point, and anything flammable in
[29:31] a sealed metal drum was worth a look.
[29:35] The property was also being released by the landlord, so
[29:38] nobody objected to a few men having a wander through the
[29:41] garden. It was the summer of 1916 in the
[29:46] village was called Sinkota, a quiet little place that sat
[29:50] along the rail line northeast of Budapest.
[29:53] The owner was a tradesman named Bella Kiss who'd been drafted in
[29:57] late 1914 and by the time the search began, was reported to
[30:02] have passed away somewhere on the Serbian front.
[30:06] There was no reason for anyone to expect anything of particular
[30:09] interest behind the house. Behind the home stood 7 large
[30:14] metal drums. They were the kind tinsmiths
[30:17] built by hand for storing oil or alcohol, each tall enough to
[30:21] reach the chest of a grown man. The landlord who'd been keeping
[30:26] a loose eye on the place had already noticed them.
[30:28] Without thinking much of it, he let the search party pry open
[30:33] the first lid, and from there all hell broke loose.
[30:38] What they found was a body, preserved and perfectly still in
[30:42] a slurry of wood alcohol that had kept it eerily intact for
[30:46] years. Inside the second drum was
[30:49] another, and another, the sickly sweet smell of methanol mixed
[30:53] with something Fowler, something that stayed in the nostrils for
[30:57] days afterward. By the time police had finished
[31:01] searching the property, the count would reach numbers that
[31:04] horrified even veteran investigators.
[31:07] And the man responsible, the quiet tinsmith who had lived
[31:11] among them for more than a decade, was nowhere to be found.
[31:16] Belikis's early life is the sort of thing historians of crime
[31:19] have had to piece together from civil records in a small pile of
[31:22] newspaper coverage that came after his disappearance.
[31:26] Most accounts place his birth in 1877, though some later sources
[31:31] shift the date slightly earlier. What's consistent is the picture
[31:35] of a young Hungarian tradesman with a modest upbringing.
[31:39] He made his way to Chincota, a village just outside of
[31:43] Budapest, sometime in the first decade of the 20th century.
[31:48] By around 1912 he had established himself at a small
[31:52] house on a quiet St. most often identified in the surviving
[31:56] reports as part of the villages main residential strip.
[32:00] He worked as a tinsmith, which in rural Hungary of that era
[32:04] meant repairing pots, repairing pipes, and shaping metal
[32:08] fittings for carts and farm houses.
[32:11] But most importantly, it meant building and maintaining the
[32:14] large cylindrical drums that farmers and distillers use to
[32:19] store liquids. It was a practical, unremarkable
[32:22] trade, and his neighbors tended to like him.
[32:26] He was well mannered and soft spoken, the kind of man who
[32:29] tipped his hat to old women on the street and paid his bills on
[32:33] time. He was also, by most reports,
[32:36] unusually handsome, and contemporary descriptions tend
[32:40] to emphasize his fair hair, light eyes and general good
[32:44] looks. A surviving sketch of Kiss based
[32:48] on a photograph, shows a groomed man in his late 30's, the sort
[32:52] of face a small town widow would apparently read as reassuring
[32:56] rather than alarming. That physical advantage would
[33:00] later prove essential to the things he was doing behind
[33:02] closed doors. Kiss was married, though, in a
[33:07] society where extended families shared the same St. and everyone
[33:11] knew everyone else, the details of his domestic life were
[33:15] surprisingly murky. His wife, Marie, was, according
[33:20] to some sources, considerably younger than he was.
[33:24] She was said to be bright, attractive and sociable, and
[33:28] several neighbors later told investigators that they'd
[33:31] suspected the marriage wasn't a happy 1.
[33:35] In the back garden stood a workshop, and beside the
[33:38] workshop a small stretch of land where Kiss conducted what he
[33:43] called experiments. He apparently told those who
[33:48] asked that he was developing a method for preserving meat for
[33:51] long term storage. It was the kind of explanation
[33:54] that was accepted without much follow up.
[33:57] After all, Tin Smith's were tinkerers who were always coming
[34:01] up with all sorts of odd things, and the drums were a big part of
[34:05] the trade. What investigators would later
[34:08] learn is that Kiss had been leading a second life for years,
[34:12] one conducted almost entirely through the mail.
[34:15] Hungary at the turn of the century was, like much of
[34:19] Europe, full of women who had been left behind in one way or
[34:22] another by the mechanics of an industrializing society.
[34:27] Husbands had gone to work in the cities or had emigrated to
[34:31] America, never to be heard from again.
[34:34] Young men had passed from illness or accident at rates
[34:38] that left the gender ratio incredibly skewed.
[34:42] By the time the world fell into conflict in 1914, the imbalance
[34:47] would become catastrophic. But even before 1914, a woman in
[34:52] her 30s or 40s without a husband was in a difficult position both
[34:57] financially and socially. Newspapers had begun publishing
[35:02] personal ads, what the English speaking world called lonely
[35:06] hearts columns, to help these women find companions.
[35:11] A widow in a small town might place an ad describing herself
[35:14] in flattering terms, mentioning a modest savings or a small
[35:19] inheritance. She would express interest in
[35:22] corresponding with a respectable gentleman.
[35:26] These respectable gentlemen, in turn, placed their own ads, and
[35:30] the resulting correspondence sometimes blossomed into
[35:33] courtship and marriage. Kiss, despite being married, had
[35:38] become a diligent reader of these columns.
[35:41] Though the evidence suggested this habit predated his marriage
[35:44] to Marie, it's worth noting that there's evidence that he was
[35:48] married to another woman prior, though the records on this
[35:52] previous marriage are even more limited than his second one.
[35:56] Starting sometime around the turn of the century, and
[35:59] possibly earlier, he'd begun writing to the women whose
[36:03] listings caught his attention. He introduced himself under a
[36:07] rotating series of aliases, the most frequently cited being
[36:12] Hoffman. In his letters, he was charming,
[36:15] sympathetic, and patient, and he wrote about shared interests.
[36:20] He asked about their families and expressed admiration for
[36:24] their courage in reaching out at a time when a woman advertising
[36:29] for a husband still carried A slight whiff of scandal.
[36:34] Eventually, when the correspondents had reached the
[36:37] proper intimacy, he arranged to meet.
[36:41] Many of the women had already sent him small sums of money by
[36:44] that point, ostensibly to help with wedding expenses or the
[36:48] cost of his travel. Kiss, predictably, didn't
[36:51] travel, and instead they came to him.
[36:55] What the women who responded didn't know, of course, was that
[36:58] Kiss was writing to dozens of them at once.
[37:02] Each one believed she was his singular correspondent, his only
[37:05] hope, his soul romantic focus. And each one, at the moment when
[37:11] her visit to the tinsmith's house in Tincoda began, walked
[37:15] into a trap that had been set for her over weeks or months of
[37:19] careful letters. Estimates of how many women he
[37:22] corresponded with vary wildly, though some believe he
[37:26] communicated with hundreds over the course of the years.
[37:30] Not all of them agreed to visit, and some thought better of the
[37:33] idea and broke off the exchange. Some were warned off by more
[37:39] skeptical relatives, but unfortunately enough did travel
[37:43] to Sincota to fill the drums in the garden several times over.
[37:48] Many brought dowries, savings or small sums of inheritance with
[37:52] them, which Kiss pocketed after the fact.
[37:56] The money effectively funded the whole operation, though whether
[38:00] his motive was primarily financial or not isn't known.
[38:05] The initial turning point in the story, if there is one, came in
[38:09] 1912, and it didn't involve any of the women from the
[38:12] correspondence at all. Marie Kiss, according to
[38:16] accounts compiled by investigators afterwards, had
[38:20] grown tired of her distant husband and his strange hours
[38:24] and his odd experiments in the back garden.
[38:27] She'd allegedly begun a romantic relationship with a man who was
[38:30] apparently named Paul Bakari, a local artist whom the couple had
[38:34] known socially. How Kiss discovered this isn't
[38:38] exactly clear from the records that survive.
[38:41] What does appear to be clear is that in late 1912, Marie had
[38:46] vanished. The story Kiss gave his
[38:49] neighbors was that Marie had run off with Bakari and emigrated,
[38:54] possibly to America. He played the part of the
[38:57] wronged, embarrassed husband well, and he stopped attending
[39:01] social events for a while. He told friends he was
[39:04] humiliated, and neighbors reportedly felt sorry for him
[39:08] and forgave any eccentricity in the weeks that followed.
[39:12] Divorce was extremely rare in rural Hungary, and a wife's
[39:16] abandonment was, by the standards of the day, a public
[39:20] shame. At the time, no one thought much
[39:25] of it. Since Hungary was a country
[39:27] people left if they had the opportunity to do so.
[39:31] It was assumed the two had started a new life abroad, and
[39:34] for years, that was it. But when investigators would
[39:38] later pry open the drums and kiss his garden, among the
[39:42] preserved bodies they'd find were two that matched the
[39:46] descriptions of Marie and Paul. After Marie's disappearance, the
[39:50] pace of the correspondence seems to have accelerated, with more
[39:53] letters and more visits. More drums appeared quietly in
[39:57] the garden behind the workshop, and the neighbors continued to
[40:01] like him. His business continued to tick
[40:03] along, and for another two years the quiet tinsmith operated a
[40:08] private abattoir in full view of a community that noticed nothing
[40:13] at all. The thing that ultimately
[40:16] stopped Kiss, at least stopped him from continuing.
[40:19] His work at Chincota was the same thing that tore apart the
[40:23] Austro Hungarian Empire itself. In July 1914, following the
[40:28] attack on Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Austria,
[40:32] Hungary invaded Serbia. Within weeks, most of Europe had
[40:36] joined in and the Hungarian countryside was combed for
[40:40] conscripts. By the late autumn of that year,
[40:43] the call reached Chincota and Bela Kiss, then in his late 30s,
[40:48] was pulled into the uniform of the Austro Hungarian Army.
[40:53] He left abruptly. The house was locked up and the
[40:56] garden was left as it was, drums and all.
[41:00] His landlord was given instructions to watch the
[41:02] property, and neighbors waved him off from the train station
[41:06] with a mixture of patriotic pride and private grief.
[41:11] Kiss served in the infantry by most accounts, and was
[41:15] reportedly wounded at some point during the first year of the
[41:18] fighting. Details of his military career
[41:22] are fragmentary, and what survives comes from regimental
[41:25] records rather than personal correspondence.
[41:29] He seems to have been a competent enough soldier,
[41:32] neither distinguished nor disgraced.
[41:35] And then, in 1915, the reports from the front indicated that
[41:39] Bella Kiss had passed away. The cause was listed in most
[41:44] accounts as typhoid fever, which was cutting through the armies
[41:48] of Eastern Europe with complete indifference.
[41:51] His body, it was said, had been buried at a field hospital
[41:55] somewhere in Serbia. For the residents of Sincoda,
[41:59] that was the end of the matter, and the quiet tinsmith had gone
[42:03] to battle and would never come home.
[42:06] His wife had already left him. His house, they assumed, would
[42:09] eventually be cleared and rented out again, or sold.
[42:13] Life in the village, under the weight of the broader
[42:15] catastrophe unfolding in Europe, moved on.
[42:19] It would take only a little longer for the illusion to
[42:22] unravel, because the rumors of Kiss's death, as it turned out,
[42:26] were wrong or had been manufactured.
[42:31] The details of what the soldiers found on that day in July 1916
[42:35] are among the best documented aspects of the case.
[42:39] The first drum contained the body of a woman, her neck
[42:42] showing the unmistakable marks of a ligature.
[42:46] The wood alcohol had preserved her to such a degree that
[42:50] investigators believed at first she might have been placed
[42:53] inside within the past few days. That turned out to be wrong, and
[42:58] she had been there, by the eventual reckoning, for at least
[43:02] three or four years. By the time the local
[43:05] Constabulary had finished hauling the drums out into the
[43:08] sunlight and prying them open, seven bodies had been counted in
[43:12] total. Then the police brought in
[43:14] shovels and started working the garden itself, and uncovered
[43:18] even more evidence of Bella's cruelty.
[43:21] What came out of the ground over the following days brought the
[43:25] total to a number that surprised even Budapest's most experienced
[43:29] detectives. The final count, as confirmed by
[43:32] investigators and reported in the Hungarian papers, was 24
[43:37] victims, the large majority of whom had been the subjects of
[43:40] Kiss's correspondence. Most were women, but at least
[43:45] one was a man, believed to be the missing Paul Bokhari.
[43:51] The method, as far as could be reconstructed, had been
[43:54] consistent, and each woman had arrived in Cincota expecting to
[43:58] meet her future husband. Each had been welcomed warmly,
[44:03] given a meal, and eventually taken to a backroom, where Bella
[44:06] Kiss finally struck. The women's clothes and personal
[44:10] items were sometimes kept and sometimes quietly resold.
[44:14] In Budapest, it was a secondary stream of income on top of
[44:18] whatever the women had delivered in cash.
[44:21] Inside the house, police discovered an enormous
[44:24] collection of women's letters, most of them bundled and labeled
[44:29] in kisses. Careful handwriting.
[44:31] The sheer volume of the correspondence made it possible
[44:34] for the first time to begin reconstructing who the victims
[44:38] had been, where they'd come from, and how he had drawn them
[44:42] in. The case fell into the lap of a
[44:46] detective named Carolee Nagi, the Budapest police chief whose
[44:51] handling of the investigation would become legendary in
[44:53] Hungarian criminal history. Nagi was reportedly meticulous,
[44:59] and he personally oversaw the excavation of the garden and the
[45:02] cataloguing of the correspondence.
[45:05] He began the painstaking work of matching letters to missing
[45:08] persons reports across the country and beyond.
[45:12] He tracked leads into Vienna, Bratislava and several small
[45:16] towns in what would soon become the successor states of the
[45:20] former empire. He's said to have personally
[45:24] identified more than a dozen of the victims by name in the first
[45:27] year after the discovery. But Austria Hungary was on the
[45:31] verge of collapse, and communication across the
[45:34] disintegrating empire was difficult.
[45:37] The Austro Hungarian military authorities initially insisted
[45:41] that Kiss was gone and that the matter was therefore effectively
[45:45] closed, but Nagi didn't believe them.
[45:49] He sent inquiries through military channels asking for
[45:52] confirmation of Kiss's passing, details of the burial, and
[45:56] access to the regimental records.
[45:59] What came back was unsatisfying, and the body that had been
[46:03] buried under Kiss's name, it turned out, belong to someone
[46:07] else entirely. Accounts differ on how this was
[46:11] discovered, but the most widely repeated version involves a
[46:15] routine check prompted by Nagi's inquiries.
[46:18] This reportedly revealed that the soldier buried in the
[46:21] Serbian field hospital was significantly younger than Kiss
[46:25] and had been identified only through the papers he'd been
[46:28] carrying. In other words, Kiss had swapped
[46:32] identities with a comrade, and he'd taken the younger man's
[46:35] papers and placed his own on the body.
[46:39] To anyone processing the paperwork in the chaos of the
[46:42] Eastern Front, the paper identity was the only identity
[46:46] that mattered. And Bella Kiss officially was
[46:50] gone. The man wearing his skin was
[46:54] walking free somewhere in the ruins of the Empire.
[46:57] By the time this was confirmed, any real chance of catching him
[47:01] had already passed, and Hungary dissolved into revolution and
[47:05] then a counter revolution. Borders shifted, records
[47:09] disappeared, and somewhere in all of that Kiss perhaps slipped
[47:13] further out of reach. What happened to Bella Kiss
[47:18] after 1916 is essentially a problem of folklore disguised as
[47:23] a problem of history. In 1919, a rumor circulated
[47:28] through Budapest that Kiss had been spotted walking across the
[47:32] Margaret Bridge in a part of the city he'd known well in his
[47:35] younger days. A former neighbor reportedly
[47:38] recognized him, and the police were called.
[47:41] By the time they arrived, the man on the bridge was gone,
[47:45] absorbed into the crowds of a Capitol still reeling from the
[47:49] collapse of the empire. Whether the witness had actually
[47:52] seen him, or had simply seen a stranger who resembled a face
[47:56] from a newspaper sketch is something no one ever managed to
[48:00] establish. Within a year or so, the stories
[48:04] took on a more international flavor.
[48:07] One account, widely repeated in newspaper columns during the
[48:11] following decade, placed KISS in the French Foreign Legion, where
[48:15] he was said to be serving under the name Hoffman.
[48:18] If this was true, he reportedly claimed to be a German or an
[48:22] Austrian, and was using the same alias he'd used in most of his
[48:25] letters. He was reportedly overheard in a
[48:29] Legion barracks bragging about his skill with a garrotte, which
[48:32] another soldier connected to the Cincota case.
[48:36] When investigators arrived to speak with him, they were told
[48:39] that the soldier in question had deserted only days before.
[48:44] Whether any of this actually happened is extremely difficult
[48:47] to establish. The Legion of the period kept
[48:50] notoriously loose records, and most of the claims can't be
[48:53] verified against a surviving document.
[48:57] Newspapers, for their part, had something of an incentive to
[49:00] keep Bella Kiss in the headlines since his name moved papers.
[49:06] The most famous of the sightings came in 1932, when a New York
[49:10] detective named Henry Oswald reportedly saw a man emerging
[49:14] from a Times Square subway station.
[49:17] He was absolutely convinced that the man he had seen was none
[49:21] other than Bella Kiss himself. Living in America, Oswald was
[49:25] well known within the department for an unusually precise visual
[49:29] memory. By the time he pushed through
[49:32] the crowd to get a better look, the man had vanished into the
[49:35] street traffic and he was never identified.
[49:39] Ultimately, I have to question this sighting since Kiss would
[49:44] have been about 20 years older than the famous sketch of him at
[49:47] this time. Further, if Kiss was alive and
[49:51] on the Lam, I'm going to assume he would at least have the sense
[49:54] to adopt some different facial hair.
[49:57] If he hadn't had this minimal survival sense, I seriously have
[50:01] to question how he would have been on the run that long
[50:04] despite being so infamous. There were other sightings as
[50:08] well, and New York City appears to have been something of an
[50:11] epicenter of this phenomenon. In the mid 30s, a janitor in a
[50:16] New York apartment block apparently closely resembled
[50:19] Bella Kiss. However, when the authorities
[50:23] went to investigate this janitor, he had allegedly
[50:26] stopped working there and could never be tracked down.
[50:31] There was also allegedly an instance of a man trying to
[50:35] cross the Hungarian border in the 1920s who resembled Kiss,
[50:40] though this is poorly attested in the sources.
[50:44] What we do know is that Kiss was never officially caught and
[50:48] never had to face the consequences of his serial
[50:51] predation. 24 people, at minimum, were pulled from his
[50:56] backyard in the summer of 1916. Hundreds more letters lay in his
[51:01] house, some of them from women who had simply drifted out of
[51:05] his correspondence before making the trip.
[51:08] The man who'd orchestrated it all slipped out of the paperwork
[51:12] of a collapsing empire and walked into a gap in the
[51:15] historical record so wide that, over a century later, we still
[51:20] have no answers.

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