# 4 Disturbing Unsolved Mysteries Too Weird For Netflix | 198

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 2 Apr 2026, 40 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO8366158624.mp3

Join me for 4 unsolved mysteries that are extremely chilling. Episode 198 of the true crime podcast btw. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: 🛍️ Merch: https://lazy-chill-zone-shop.fourthwall.com ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 unsolved mysteries, true crime, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, missing persons, murder investigation, forensic evidence, serial killers, crime scene analysis, dark history, criminal psychology, real life horror, police investigations, DNA breakthroughs, forensic genealogy, crime documentaries, criminal profiling, mysterious disappearances, solved cases, justice system, law enforcement stories, cold case files, creepy mysteries, true crime storytelling, crime reconstruction, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, disturbing cases, true crime analysis, hidden clues, infamous crimes, real crime stories, forensic evidence, heists, art theft

## Transcript

[0:00] Somebody better help her. That's what the man said as he
[0:03] walked out of the maze of bookshelves on the second level
[0:06] of Penn State's Paddy Library on the afternoon of November 28th,
[0:10] 1969. His right hand was tucked behind
[0:14] his back as he climbed the stairs and disappeared inside
[0:18] the stacks. A 22 year old English graduate
[0:22] student named Betsy Ardzma was lying on the floor between rows
[0:26] of dusty periodicals. Not a single person around her
[0:30] understood what was going on, since the wound she had
[0:33] sustained was both incredibly small and incredibly deep.
[0:39] She had been wearing a red dress over a white turtleneck, and
[0:42] that red fabric masked the true nature of the injury.
[0:47] By the time anyone figured out what had actually happened,
[0:50] Betsy Ardsma was beyond saving and her attacker had vanished
[0:54] into history. On the afternoon of November
[0:59] 28th, 1969, the day after Thanksgiving, Betsy left her
[1:04] residence in Atherton Hall with her roommate, Sharon Brandt.
[1:08] They were heading to Patty Library so Betsy could gather
[1:11] research material for an English paper.
[1:14] The two separated at some point before reaching the library, and
[1:19] Betsy ended up on level 2 of the building score stacks.
[1:23] It was a remote and poorly lit area of narrow aisles hemmed in
[1:27] by towering shelves of old periodicals.
[1:30] Notably, the secluded nature of this section was well known on
[1:34] campus for all the wrong reasons.
[1:38] It had a reputation as a meeting spot for illicit encounters,
[1:42] which would become a complicating factor in the
[1:44] investigation that followed. Sometime between 4:45 and 4:55
[1:49] PM, students nearby heard what sounded like a gasp and the
[1:54] crash of falling books. Moments later, a tall man with
[1:59] blonde hair wearing khaki trousers and a flannel shirt
[2:03] emerged from the stacks and delivered his now infamous line
[2:07] about helping the girl. Two people saw him clearly
[2:11] enough to provide descriptions later.
[2:13] Merrily Erdely, a classmate of Betsy's, and Joao Wafinda, an
[2:19] international student. When library staff reached
[2:22] Betsy, they concluded she'd had some kind of fairly routine
[2:26] medical episode, a fainting spell, or, in the worst case,
[2:30] maybe a seizure. They noticed fluid on the tile
[2:34] floor and, somewhat bizarrely, sent janitors to clean it up
[2:38] before any detectives arrived. While they waited for medical
[2:42] help, they had the shelving straightened and the books
[2:44] restacked, further destroying evidence from the scene.
[2:49] They did all of this before anyone contacted police.
[2:53] By the time Betsy was rushed to the campus hospital, the crime
[2:57] scene had been effectively destroyed.
[3:01] The investigation that followed was massive in scale and almost
[3:04] immediately hamstrung. The Pennsylvania State Police
[3:08] assigned roughly 35 troopers to the case.
[3:12] They set up a temporary command center on the campus and began
[3:15] interviewing hundreds of students and faculty, but the
[3:19] fundamentals were gone. The crime scene had been
[3:22] contaminated before law enforcement even knew a crime
[3:25] had occurred. No weapon was ever recovered,
[3:29] and the physical evidence was nearly non existent given that a
[3:33] janitor had cleaned up the scene.
[3:35] They detected male biological traces in the area using black
[3:39] lights, but given the stacks dubious reputation, those traces
[3:44] could have come from anyone at any time.
[3:47] Composite sketches were drawn from witness descriptions, but
[3:50] only one was released to the public.
[3:53] Ultimately, though, the case would go cold without any
[3:57] suspects being named. Patty Library kept its doors
[4:00] open, and the spot where Betsy lost her life became just
[4:04] another aisle in a building most students walked through without
[4:08] a second thought. In the late 2000s, two
[4:13] independent investigators converged on the same name,
[4:16] Richard Charles Hafner. Hafner was a geology graduate
[4:20] student at Penn State in 1969. He'd earned his master's degree
[4:25] there that same year and would go on to complete his PhD by
[4:29] 1972. He was tall, handsome, well
[4:33] dressed, and by all accounts, extremely volatile.
[4:38] He had a hair trigger temper, particularly where women were
[4:41] concerned, and reportedly carried a custom made knife.
[4:45] His connection to Betsy was personal, as he'd briefly
[4:49] pursued a romantic relationship with her that fall, but she'd
[4:53] rebuffed him in favor of her boyfriend, David Wright.
[4:57] Betsy's roommate, Sharon Brandt, told police shortly after the
[5:01] slaying that Hafner had visited their dorm room more than once
[5:05] in the weeks before the attack. She strongly suggested he be
[5:09] interviewed in relation to the crime, believing that his
[5:12] behaviour was highly unusual during this period.
[5:16] What happened with that interview, if it even happened
[5:20] at all, remains unclear in the public record.
[5:24] But here's the thing. There were significant other
[5:27] warning signs as well. Beyond his strange conduct with
[5:30] her roommate on the evening Betsy died, approximately 45
[5:36] minutes after she was slain, Hafner showed up at a
[5:39] professor's home in an agitated state.
[5:42] He was out of breath and wanting to know if there was anything in
[5:45] the news about a girl being slain in Patty Library.
[5:49] This is particularly odd because he doesn't seem to have
[5:52] suggested who this person was, despite them being fairly well
[5:56] known to one another. He later appeared at her
[6:00] boyfriend's residence, similarly anxious and seeking information.
[6:06] Now, while none of this is definitive, of course, Hafner's
[6:09] subsequent life didn't do much to inspire confidence in his
[6:13] character. In 1975, he was charged with
[6:17] committing some real sick acts, but the trial held in January
[6:21] 1976 before a Lancaster County jury, ended in a mistrial due to
[6:26] a hung jury. Accusations of predatory
[6:29] behavior followed him for years, and it was noted that the
[6:33] earliest accusations came before the attack on Betsy.
[6:37] He was cited for disorderly conduct in 1981, charged with
[6:41] aggravated assault and resisting arrest in 1994, and convicted of
[6:46] assaulting a woman in a Delaware parking lot in 1998.
[6:50] He passed away from a heart attack in 2002, never having
[6:54] been charged with Betsy's slaying or even named as a
[6:58] person of interest. The most damning piece of
[7:02] information came to light after Hafner's death.
[7:06] In 2009, a researcher who was working on the case was
[7:10] contacted by Hafner's nephew. The nephew disclosed that around
[7:15] 1975, he'd overheard A heated argument between Hafner and his
[7:20] grandmother, Hafner's mom. The argument reportedly
[7:24] escalated until the mother made a statement to the effect that
[7:27] he'd taken that girl's life and now he was destroying hers.
[7:31] If this is true, at the very least it suggests that Hafner's
[7:35] mother believed that he had committed the crime, whether he
[7:39] actually did it or not. And that's the thing.
[7:42] Hafner was definitely an absolutely sick individual and a
[7:45] predator, and she knew he knew Betsy.
[7:49] She may have simply believed that he was capable of the crime
[7:53] and come to believe that he definitely did it.
[7:57] In the summer or early fall of 1976, David Wright, Betsy's
[8:02] boyfriend, went to Penn State's Dean, a man named Charles
[8:05] Hosler, and told him about Hafner.
[8:09] Why he specifically did this so many years after the crime
[8:12] remains a mystery, and some have speculated it may have been
[8:16] because of the trial, which occurred the same year.
[8:20] He shared his suspicion that Hafner was responsible for
[8:23] Betsy's death, and Hosler passed the information along to the
[8:26] university's general counsel, their chief in house lawyer, so
[8:30] to speak. What happened at that point is
[8:34] unclear, though some have alleged that the university
[8:37] buried it in an effort to avoid dredging up negative press
[8:41] around the case. It probably won't shock you,
[8:44] though, that this has never been confirmed and remains simply
[8:48] that, an unproven allegation. Personally, I suspect that they
[8:54] simply turned over what Wright said to the police.
[8:59] There are, of course, a number of other theories outside of the
[9:02] Hafner hypothesis. Some investigators over the
[9:05] years also looked into a possible connection to Ted
[9:08] Bundy, who'd attended Temple University around the same
[9:11] period, but the link never held up under scrutiny.
[9:16] A psychologist who'd examined Bundy for his defense team in
[9:20] the mid 1980s dismissed the theory entirely, noting that the
[9:24] method didn't match Bundy's established patterns.
[9:28] The investigation into that angle was ultimately
[9:31] inconclusive and is generally considered to be highly
[9:34] unlikely. It's also notable that the
[9:37] description of the attacker simply doesn't look like Bundy
[9:40] at all, unless we are to assume he was wearing a blonde wig for
[9:44] the crime. All that said, as I was
[9:47] recording this video, it turns out that Bundy has now been
[9:50] definitively linked to another victim in 1974, so his list of
[9:55] crimes continues to grow. Another theory suggested Betsy
[9:59] may have stumbled upon an illicit encounter in the stacks
[10:03] and been silenced, but this too remained unsubstantiated.
[10:10] One thing I wasn't able to find out in my research is if the
[10:13] male biological samples found in the stacks were preserved for
[10:16] genetic testing. If they were, and that's a big
[10:20] if, this could potentially prove the Hafner theory, even though
[10:26] he would no longer be available for direct genetic testing.
[10:30] Genetic genealogy techniques could potentially be useful.
[10:34] However, in 1969, forensic genetic testing, even in its
[10:38] absolute most basic form, was still decades away, so I truly
[10:44] doubt samples were preserved. Of course, another significant
[10:48] weakness of this approach is that the genetic material may
[10:51] not have been related to the crime whatsoever.
[10:54] These remote library stacks were used as a lover's lane of sorts,
[10:59] so a lack of a connection wouldn't be definitive.
[11:02] Strictly speaking, due to the reputation of the stacks, even a
[11:06] positive connection to Hafner wouldn't actually prove the case
[11:09] beyond a reasonable doubt, but it would likely provide closure.
[11:17] A father of three texts his wife that he's on his way home.
[11:20] Then he stops for gas and pulls cash out from a bank machine.
[11:24] And then he's gone. Not figuratively, not
[11:28] temporarily, but in the full and devastating sense of the word.
[11:33] Dino Valdez stepped into the ether on September 18th, 2025,
[11:40] somewhere in Santa Fe, NM, and no one has been able to figure
[11:44] out what happened to him. What makes this mystery so
[11:47] difficult to sit with isn't just the absence of answers, it's the
[11:52] collision between 2 completely different stories about who Dino
[11:56] Valdez was and what happened to him.
[11:59] One account is told by people who knew him well, and another
[12:03] has been told by individuals whose credibility remains very
[12:07] much in question. Valdez was 36, a Marine veteran
[12:14] who'd served multiple tours in Afghanistan and a journeyman
[12:17] lineman for American power. He'd married his high school
[12:21] sweetheart, Victoria, and the two had been together 15 years,
[12:26] a period of time during which their family had continued to
[12:29] grow. The family lived in Coyote, a
[12:32] small community in northern New Mexico's Rio Arriba County, on a
[12:36] property shared with Dino's father.
[12:39] Dino had grown up there, and his roots ran deep in that soil.
[12:43] In September 2025, he'd been working a contract job in Silver
[12:47] City, about 300 miles South of home.
[12:51] The arrangement was typical for lineman work.
[12:54] Stay near the job during the week, drive home on the
[12:57] weekends. It was a long haul, but it was
[13:00] steady and the pay was good. And Dina was the kind of man who
[13:04] kept to a routine. He showed up, he called home,
[13:08] and he always came back. And that consistency is exactly
[13:12] why his disappearance hit so hard.
[13:16] Dino left Silver City around noon on September 18th.
[13:20] At roughly 2:30 in the afternoon, he texted Victoria to
[13:24] let her know he was heading north.
[13:26] About an hour after that, he spoke with a cousin by phone.
[13:31] Nothing in either communication raised any alarm.
[13:35] Then, around 5:30 that evening, his credit card registered a gas
[13:39] purchase at an Allsups convenience store on Cirillos
[13:42] Road in Santa Fe, followed by a cash withdrawal.
[13:47] Those two transactions are the last verified actions Dino
[13:51] Valdez is known to have taken on his own.
[13:54] And you may notice my unusual phrasing there.
[13:57] And trust me, that's intentional.
[13:59] So keep it in mind. After 5:30 PM on September 18th,
[14:04] there's nothing. No further word of any kind from
[14:07] the man himself. Victoria reported him missing to
[14:11] New Mexico State Police on September 21st.
[14:14] The three day gap between his last text and the missing person
[14:18] report isn't unusual when you factor in spotty rural cell
[14:23] coverage and an unpredictable work schedule.
[14:26] However, it meant that by the time investigators started
[14:29] retracing his steps, the trail was already rapidly cooling.
[14:34] On September 19th, the day after Dino was last confirmed alive,
[14:39] four separate 911 calls came in from the Harrison Rd. area in
[14:43] Santa Fe. Callers described a violent
[14:46] disturbance involving a white pickup truck with someone inside
[14:50] who was screaming loudly as if in complete terror.
[14:54] One caller reported that several individuals arrived in a dark
[14:57] colored vehicle, broke the trucks rear passenger window and
[15:01] entered it. Both vehicles then took off
[15:04] toward Aguafrea St. leaving behind a man in a white shirt
[15:08] and shorts who appeared to be severely impaired.
[15:12] A license plate number provided by one of the callers matched
[15:15] Dino's 2015 Chevy Silverado. Santa Fe Police were dispatched
[15:21] around 2:45, but the responding officers were redirected to a
[15:25] higher priority robbery call. By the time someone actually
[15:29] arrived at the Harrison Rd. scene well after the first call,
[15:33] there was nothing to find. The truck was gone, and there
[15:37] was absolutely no trace of evidence to suggest anything had
[15:40] occurred at that scene. Whatever had happened there had
[15:45] played out entirely without law enforcement present.
[15:49] That delayed response became one of the most heavily scrutinized
[15:52] elements of the investigation. 4 independent callers a plate
[15:57] match to a missing man's vehicle, and nobody from law
[16:00] enforcement actually witnessed any of it.
[16:05] In the days following the disappearance, Dino's credit
[16:08] card didn't go dormant. On the morning of September
[16:11] 19th, a large gas purchase was made, far too much to fill a
[16:16] single truck, the kind of amount that suggested multiple vehicles
[16:20] were being fueled. Over the next two days,
[16:23] additional charges appeared at a car wash and a retail store,
[16:27] along with three more attempted transactions.
[16:30] Victoria caught the activity, recognized it didn't match
[16:34] Dino's habits, and immediately cancelled the card.
[16:38] However, at that time, she believed that he likely had just
[16:41] lost his wallet and she didn't jump to the worst case scenario
[16:45] and report him missing. Then came October 13th when a
[16:50] State Police officer on patrol near Harrison Rd. stopped a man
[16:54] on a bicycle for running a stop sign.
[16:57] The man had outstanding warrants and when he was arrested,
[17:00] officers found Dino Valdez's driver's license in his
[17:03] possession. When the man was questioned, he
[17:07] claimed that he had quote UN quote found it, but had no
[17:10] further knowledge about who the man was.
[17:13] And I'm going to interject in the narrative here since I've
[17:16] seen some talk online about how this individual was likely
[17:19] involved. I suspect that likely wasn't the
[17:23] case, since I doubt any criminal who had been involved in the
[17:27] disappearance would have held on to such an obvious piece of
[17:30] evidence. The idea that the driver's
[17:33] license was found by an addict who may have been contemplating
[17:37] using it for other nefarious purposes does strike me as
[17:40] fairly likely. That would also explain why the
[17:44] man wasn't overly helpful when questioned, since obviously he
[17:48] was planning on doing something questionable with the license.
[17:50] Regardless, on October 28th, state police interviewed a
[17:55] homeless person who offered a disturbing account of what
[17:58] happened. A woman had allegedly given Dino
[18:01] fent in place of coke. This was allegedly due to what
[18:05] I'll euphemistically call a mix up regarding payments for
[18:08] services rendered. The implication was that Valdez
[18:12] had died of an overdose on or around September 19th.
[18:16] Shortly after police interviewed the woman in question, who
[18:20] reportedly marked a location on a phone where Valdez's body had
[18:25] supposedly been taken, somewhere in the mountains near Pecos.
[18:30] No body has ever been recovered from that location or anywhere
[18:33] else, and detectives noted that both of these people had very
[18:38] significant credibility issues. When the Santa Fe New Mexican
[18:42] newspaper published details from police reports in December 2025,
[18:47] they sparked A firestorm. The framing of the story around
[18:51] the allegation that Valdez had solicited illicit goods and
[18:55] services wasn't well received at all.
[18:58] People who knew Dino rejected the characterization outright,
[19:03] saying that he wasn't into that sort of thing.
[19:06] The Valdez family acknowledged publicly that they believe Dino
[19:10] is no longer alive, but they firmly rejected the version of
[19:14] events emerging from police reports.
[19:17] The Valdez family hired a private investigator who has
[19:20] stated that foul play was unquestionably involved.
[19:24] According to their theory, Dino was targeted by strangers for
[19:27] material gain. The stolen truck, the
[19:31] unauthorized card usage, and the possession of his identification
[19:35] by a stranger all point, in their view, towards something
[19:38] far more deliberate. And while I don't necessarily
[19:42] agree on that last point, the first two points do seem to
[19:45] suggest a financial motive for the disappearance in a way the
[19:49] accidental overdose narrative doesn't.
[19:53] As of early 2026, a New Mexico State Police spokesperson
[19:57] confirmed that the case remains classified as a missing person's
[20:00] investigation, not a criminal one.
[20:04] Valdez hasn't been located, and his white Silverado hasn't been
[20:07] recovered. No arrests have been made and no
[20:10] charges have been filed against the woman identified in police
[20:13] interviews or the man found with Dino's license.
[20:20] What's up everyone, it's Jimmy here with my usual quick
[20:23] reminder to hit the like and subscribe buttons and the
[20:26] notification bell. Also, don't forget to consider
[20:29] checking out the YouTube membership or the Patreon if you
[20:33] want to take your support up to the next level.
[20:39] On the morning of June 1st, 19 O2 William Harsent walked into
[20:44] the kitchen of Providence House in Peasant Hall, Suffolk.
[20:48] He found his daughter Rose lying at the bottom of the servant's
[20:51] staircase, clearly deceased from apparent stab wounds.
[20:56] Her nightgown was scorched, the lower half of her body was
[21:00] charred by fire, and a smashed oil lamp lay nearby alongside a
[21:05] bottle reeking of paraffin. She was 22 years old and, as the
[21:10] post mortem would soon reveal, 6 months pregnant, a fact that
[21:15] wasn't publicly known. Peasant Hall was a quiet
[21:18] agricultural village in Suffolk, England, and its rhythms were
[21:22] dictated by harvests, Chapel services, and local gossip.
[21:27] But gossip had been churning around Rose Harson for over a
[21:30] year before her death, and the man at the center of it was
[21:35] about to become the prime suspect in one of the most
[21:39] confounding cases in English legal history.
[21:44] Rose Harsant had been employed as a live in domestic servant by
[21:48] William and Georgiana Crisp at Providence House.
[21:52] She was also a member of the local Primitive Methodist Choir,
[21:56] and it was there that she'd crossed paths with William
[21:58] Gardner, the chapel's choir master and a Sunday school
[22:02] supervisor. Gardner was 35, married to a
[22:07] woman named Georgina and the father of six children.
[22:12] He worked as a foreman at a local factory and was a man of
[22:16] real standing in a community where standing meant something.
[22:20] In May of 19 O1, roughly a year before Rose's death, 2 Peasant
[22:25] Hall residents named Alfonso Skinner and George Wright
[22:29] claimed they'd witnessed something compromising.
[22:33] They said they saw Rose enter the Doctor's Chapel, a Wesleyan
[22:37] Methodist building she'd been tasked with cleaning, and then
[22:40] watched as Gardner slipped in after her.
[22:44] According to their account, they overheard conversation between
[22:47] the two that referenced a very spicy chapter of the Book of
[22:51] Genesis. The rumor tore through the
[22:53] village, and Gardner denied everything and demanded an
[22:56] apology, which Skinner and Wright refused.
[23:00] A church inquiry convened under Reverend John Guy found nothing
[23:04] conclusive to indicate any wrongdoing aside from the
[23:08] testimony of these two town gossips.
[23:11] Guy dismissed the matter as trumped up, and the congregation
[23:14] rejected Gardner's offer to resign.
[23:18] On paper, the scandal was over, but in practice it had only
[23:22] burrowed deeper, dividing this community.
[23:25] Many people believed that the highly specific testimony of
[23:28] Skinner and Wright had been disregarded due to Gardner's
[23:32] social standing, A recipe for trouble.
[23:35] But let's get back to what happened to Rose in the
[23:37] subsequent investigation itself. When police arrived at
[23:42] Providence House, they found a crime scene dense with evidence
[23:46] but frustratingly short uncertainty.
[23:49] Rose's body showed defensive wounds on her hands and bruising
[23:53] on her face, making clear she'd fought her attacker.
[23:57] The kitchen smelled strongly of paraffin, and beyond the broken
[24:01] lamp and the charring on her body, officers recovered a
[24:04] prescription bottle traced to the Gardner household.
[24:08] There was also a letter unsigned.
[24:11] It was addressed to R and instructed her to place a light
[24:15] in her window at 10:00 for about 10 minutes before extinguishing
[24:18] it. It also said that the writer
[24:21] would come around to the back at midnight if the candle signal
[24:23] had been raised. Someone had arranged A
[24:26] clandestine meeting with Rose on the night she was slain, and the
[24:30] question was whether the handwriting belonged to Gardner.
[24:35] Investigators also found a copy of the East Anglian Daily Times
[24:39] near the body. Rose's employers, the Crisps,
[24:43] didn't subscribe to this newspaper, but William Gardner
[24:47] did. A clasp knife belonging to
[24:50] Gardner was examined and found to have trace remnants of a
[24:53] suspicious red fluid inside its hinge.
[24:56] Neighbors reported seeing Gardner on his porch at around
[24:59] 10:00 on the night of the crime, near the time when the candle
[25:03] signal was supposed to be sent out.
[25:06] The day after Rose's body was discovered, witnesses claimed
[25:10] they'd seen a bonfire burning on Gardner's property.
[25:14] On June 3rd, 19 O2 William Gardner was arrested and most
[25:19] people thought the matter had been wrapped up in a nice, neat
[25:22] little package. But then came the trials.
[25:27] The first trial opened at the Ipswich of Sizes on November
[25:30] 7th, 19 O2. The prosecutor was Henry
[25:34] Fielding Dickens, son of the novelist Charles Dickens, with
[25:38] the defense led by Ernest Wilde before Judge Sir William
[25:42] Grantham. And yes, if you're wondering why
[25:44] I gave all their names, it was indeed because I wanted to name
[25:48] drop Charles Dickens's son in this segment.
[25:52] As a quick aside, it was while researching the much more famous
[25:55] Charles Dickens that I ended up stumbling upon this case, but I
[25:59] digress. The prosecution's case was
[26:02] entirely circumstantial, since there was no eyewitness, no
[26:07] confession, and no forensic technology capable of linking
[26:11] Gardner to the scene. What they had was a web of
[26:14] suggestive details. The medicine bottle, the
[26:18] newspaper, the letter, the knife, the bonfire, the scandal,
[26:24] and the pregnancy. The defense hit back hard.
[26:28] Georgina Gardner testified that her husband had been in bed with
[26:31] her the entire night. A neighbor corroborated this,
[26:35] claiming she'd been awake late into the night and hadn't seen
[26:39] him leave the house during that period.
[26:42] Georgina also explained away the medicine bottle, saying she'd
[26:46] given it to Rose when she was unwell.
[26:49] The mysterious red fluid on the knife's hinge simply came from
[26:53] skinning a rabbit and it was cleaned off because that's just
[26:57] good hygiene. The so-called bonfire was simply
[27:01] for boiling water, a common practice in that area at that
[27:04] time. But the defense's most
[27:07] aggressive tactic was an all out assault on Rose's character.
[27:12] They revealed that love letters and suggestive poems from
[27:15] various men had been found in her room.
[27:18] The argument was blunt. Rose had been involved with
[27:21] multiple men, any of whom could have been the father and, by
[27:25] extension, her attacker. The prosecution couldn't
[27:30] definitively prove Gardner was the father, and this ambiguity
[27:33] cut deep into their case. After three days of testimony,
[27:39] the jury was sent away to come to their decision.
[27:42] They came back deadlocked, and 11 of 12 jurors voted to
[27:45] convict. But a single holdout, a man
[27:49] named Evan Edwards, refused to agree.
[27:53] The result was a mistrial. The second trial began on
[27:57] January 20th, 19 O3 this time before a separate judge.
[28:02] The evidence and arguments were largely the same, but the
[28:06] outcome flipped almost perfectly, raising disturbing
[28:09] questions about jury systems generally.
[28:12] This time, 11 jurors voted to acquit, with only one holding
[28:16] out for conviction. Faced with the near certainty
[28:20] that a third trial would produce the same result, the prosecution
[28:24] declined to proceed further. The attorney general issued a
[28:27] writ of null, a pro sequi, meaning that they were not going
[28:31] to attempt a further conviction, effectively ending the case.
[28:36] William Gardner walked free. Though he was never formally
[28:39] acquitted, and under English law at the time, he existed in a
[28:44] kind of legal limbo. Neither convicted nor cleared,
[28:50] Gardner and his family left Peasant Hall and relocated to
[28:54] London, where he lived quietly until his passing in 1941,
[28:58] having never spoken publicly about the case.
[29:01] The village, for its part, slowly moved on, though the
[29:05] brutal slaying left a mark that endured for generations.
[29:10] Over the years, several alternative theories have
[29:13] emerged. Some researchers have pointed to
[29:16] Frederick Davis, one of the men whose letters were found in
[29:19] Rose's room, as a potential suspect.
[29:23] Others have proposed a rather bizarre theory where they
[29:27] believe she accidentally fell, struck her head, and then
[29:31] someone simply decided to finish her off.
[29:34] I'm not quite sure I understand that theory, but some people
[29:38] seem to take it seriously, though as far as I can tell it
[29:41] is highly speculative at best and complete fiction at worst.
[29:46] Perhaps the most compelling alternative theory points to
[29:50] Georgina Gardner herself. The argument runs like this.
[29:55] Georgina knew about the affair, knew about the pregnancy, and
[29:59] had every motive to confront the woman threatening to destroy her
[30:03] family. If Georgina was the one who went
[30:06] to Providence House that night, it would explain why William's
[30:10] alibi centered so firmly on his wife's testimony.
[30:14] Georgina was in essence never looked at as a suspect because
[30:18] going on the logic of the time, women didn't commit such
[30:21] personal up close acts of violence.
[30:24] In hindsight, if true, it would explain the ferocity of the
[30:28] attack which bore the hallmarks of personal rage rather than
[30:33] cold calculation. Personally, I think this idea
[30:36] makes a lot of sense since Georgina could have planned the
[30:40] crime to make it appear like her husband did it.
[30:43] Afterwards. She could have fully confessed
[30:46] what she had done to her husband while also letting him know that
[30:50] she would be his alibi if true. Georgina may have leveraged the
[30:55] virtually non existent forensic technology of the time to commit
[30:59] the virtually perfect crime and quote UN quote when her husband
[31:03] back in the process. It's extremely dark, but
[31:07] honestly it's why I find this unsolved mystery so extremely
[31:12] compelling. Whether or not Georgina was
[31:16] responsible, no one was ever held accountable for what
[31:20] happened to Rose Harsant. She was a young woman caught
[31:23] between the rigid morality of Edwardian village life and the
[31:27] private desires that ran beneath it.
[31:30] The scandal that preceded her death had already reduced her to
[31:34] an object of gossip. The trials that followed reduced
[31:38] her further, turning her personal life into a courtroom
[31:41] weapon deployed against her own memory.
[31:44] In the end, despite the horrors of the crime that was committed,
[31:49] the legal system ultimately just gave up.
[31:56] In 1929, a single photograph made its way into newspapers and
[32:00] scientific journals across the world, and it appeared to show
[32:04] something impossible. It was an ape sitting upright on
[32:09] a wooden crate somewhere in the jungles of South America.
[32:14] The problem? Apes don't live in South
[32:16] America. They never have.
[32:19] The continents primate population consists entirely of
[32:22] monkeys, and the distinction between the two is significant.
[32:26] If the photograph was genuine, it would have rewritten
[32:30] everything scientists thought they knew about primate
[32:32] distribution and evolution. It didn't, of course, but the
[32:37] story behind how that image came to exist and why anyone believed
[32:41] it is far more interesting than the creature itself.
[32:46] The man behind the photograph was Francois Deloise, a Swiss
[32:50] geologist born in 1892 who'd been sent to South America on an
[32:55] oil prospecting expedition. And before you leave a comment
[32:59] about the pronunciation, I've always heard this creature
[33:02] called the Deloise Ape using the English style pronunciation, so
[33:07] I'm going to stick with that throughout.
[33:10] Between 1917 and 1920, Deloise and his team surveyed the dense,
[33:15] unforgiving jungle along the Venezuela, Colombia border.
[33:19] It wasn't glamorous work and the region was brutally hostile,
[33:23] thick with tropical disease and dangerous wildlife.
[33:27] The model own indigenous people, who viewed the surveyors as
[33:31] unwelcome intruders also presented a significant threat.
[33:35] They attacked the expedition repeatedly, and Deloise himself
[33:39] reportedly took an arrow to the knee during one skirmish.
[33:44] Well, actually, it seems more likely he took the arrow to the
[33:47] thigh, but let's not let that get in the way of dredging up a
[33:51] good Skyrim meme. But I digress.
[33:55] Of the 20 men who set out on the expedition, allegedly only four
[33:59] of them made it home alive. It was during this harrowing
[34:03] period that Deloise claimed his extraordinary encounter took
[34:06] place. According to his account, while
[34:09] the group was camped near the Terra River, two large primates
[34:13] emerged from the undergrowth. They walked upright, broke
[34:17] branches from nearby trees and waved them aggressively like
[34:21] weapons. They hurled their own excrement
[34:24] at the men and Delois team opened fire, cutting down the
[34:28] female while the male fled into the jungle.
[34:31] The men then propped the body of the deceased creature on a
[34:34] wooden crate and took a photograph.
[34:37] And while I've had to crop this famous picture due to censorship
[34:40] issues, many people assume the so-called ape was male, but it
[34:45] was in fact female. Deloise said the animal stood
[34:49] roughly 4 feet 5 inches tall, had no tail and possessed 32
[34:54] teeth, the same number found in humans and apes, not monkeys.
[35:00] For nearly a decade, the photograph sat quietly in
[35:03] Deloise's personal travel notebook.
[35:06] It wasn't until 1929 that it found its champion in George
[35:10] Montandon, a French Swiss anthropologist who reportedly
[35:14] stumbled across the image while leafing through records.
[35:18] Montandon was electrified, and he declared the creature an
[35:21] entirely new, previously unknown species and gave it a scientific
[35:27] name. He presented his findings to the
[35:30] French Academy of Sciences, his paper was published, and the
[35:34] photograph was splashed across the newspapers of the world.
[35:38] But Montandon's enthusiasm wasn't purely scientific, since
[35:42] his entire career was staked upon the fact that apes once
[35:45] lived in the Americas. Not everyone was convinced, and
[35:50] in fact, most scientists weren't buying it.
[35:53] Right from the beginning, scientists who examined the
[35:56] photograph pointed out a number of glaring problems.
[36:00] The creature's face bore A striking resemblance to that of
[36:02] a common spider monkey, a species found throughout the
[36:06] forests of Central and South America.
[36:09] Spider monkeys have prehensile tails, and the absence of one in
[36:13] the photograph raised immediate red flags.
[36:16] It looked less like the animal was naturally tailless and more
[36:21] like the tail had been deliberately removed or hidden.
[36:25] The critics also noted that certain anatomical features
[36:28] visible in the image were consistent with the anatomy of
[36:31] female spider monkeys. The claim tooth count of 32 was
[36:35] impossible to verify from a photograph, and Deloitte never
[36:39] preserved the skull, the skeleton or any other physical
[36:43] evidence. He claimed that the body had
[36:46] been lugged along for part of the journey but was ultimately
[36:49] lost in the jungle. There was also the matter of
[36:52] scale. Deloise insisted the creature
[36:55] was over 4 feet tall, but the only reference point in the
[36:59] photograph was the wooden crate it sat on.
[37:02] No one could independently verify the crates dimensions,
[37:06] and without a reliable sense of scale, the animal in the
[37:09] photograph could have been any size.
[37:13] However, supporters of the idea that this was a real ape noted
[37:17] that Deloise hadn't tried to publicize the claim at all.
[37:21] The photograph simply sat waiting to be discovered by an
[37:24] eager scientist who wanted to prove his own extremely
[37:27] questionable theories. The definitive blow came decades
[37:33] later, in 1962, when a Venezuelan physician named
[37:37] Enrique Tejera published a letter in the newspaper El
[37:41] Universal. And it's probably important to
[37:45] note here that he was a fairly significant scientist who had
[37:49] also served in various high postings in the Venezuelan
[37:52] government. Tahara had been a friend of
[37:55] Deloise and had once actually claimed to have seen a living
[37:59] South American ape himself. But in this letter he reversed
[38:03] course entirely, and he described Deloise as a prankster
[38:07] and laid out what he said really happened.
[38:10] According to Tahara, Deloise had acquired a pet spider monkey
[38:14] during the expedition. The unfortunate monkey had
[38:18] become diseased and makeshift emergency surgery was performed
[38:22] to remove the tail, saving the animal's life.
[38:24] For a time, Deloise kept the monkey as a companion, walking
[38:30] alongside it until it eventually perished, at which point he
[38:34] propped it up on the crate and snapped the famous photograph.
[38:37] As a joke, Tahara also pointed out something hiding in plain
[38:42] sight within the image itself, a banana plant growing in the
[38:46] background. Banana plants are cultivated by
[38:50] humans and generally don't grow wild in deep jungle, which meant
[38:54] the photograph likely couldn't have been taken at a remote
[38:57] wilderness campsite. The photograph almost certainly
[39:01] had to have been taken near an area of human settlement.
[39:05] Deloise never lived to see his prank fully unravelled.
[39:09] He died in 1935, just six years after the photographs
[39:13] publication, at the age of 43. Montandon's fate was grimmer
[39:18] still since he ended up aligning himself with Vichy France.
[39:23] He was ultimately eliminated by the French Resistance in 1944
[39:27] for his collaboration as politics.
[39:30] Today, the scientific consensus is unambiguous.
[39:34] The creature in the photograph was almost certainly a white
[39:37] bellied spider monkey, and the identification as a new species
[39:41] was a fraud. Bizarrely though, when I was
[39:44] growing up, I recall watching numerous documentaries on The
[39:48] History Channel that covered this quote UN quote ape.
[39:53] Unfortunately, none of those supposedly historical shows
[39:57] presented the true facts of the creature, instead presenting it
[40:01] as a potential ape in the Americas.
[40:04] Anyway, I virtually never ask this anymore, but if you
[40:07] remember this as well, please leave a comment because I need
[40:10] to know that I wasn't the only one.

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