# 5 True Crime Mysteries Even Netflix Won't Show You | 201

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 9 Apr 2026, 42 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO9411679469.mp3

Join me for 5 true crime cases that you won't see on Netflix. Episode 201 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] A cork heeled platform, shoe in a garbage can, a makeup bag on a
[0:04] footpath, a diary in the gutter and keys to an apartment nobody
[0:09] would ever come home to. That's what was left of Revel
[0:13] Balmain, scattered across 4 suburban streets in Sydney like
[0:17] bread crumbs from a nightmare. The investigation that followed
[0:21] into her mysterious disappearance would ultimately
[0:24] reveal an extremely dark side to her supposedly ideal life.
[0:30] Revel Balmain was 22 years old in November 1994.
[0:35] Born in July 1972, she'd grown up around Newcastle on the NSW
[0:41] coast. She was a dancer and a model,
[0:44] and by all accounts she was good at both.
[0:47] She'd already completed 36 week tours of Japanese cabarets,
[0:51] working as a Hostess, and she had a fourth trip lined up.
[0:55] She'd moved to Sydney earlier that year to chase bigger
[0:58] opportunities in the entertainment industry, settling
[1:01] into a unit in the upscale suburb of Bellevue Hill.
[1:05] She'd also recently started seeing a man named Piers Fisher
[1:08] Pollard, a writer and photographer, and he'd later
[1:12] describe her as generous and fun loving.
[1:15] But modeling and dancing don't always pay the rent on time,
[1:18] particularly not in a city like Sydney, and Revel had taken up
[1:22] more illicit work on the side to cover the gap.
[1:26] She worked under the name Misha for a high end agency called
[1:29] Select Companions, which was run by a married couple, Jane King
[1:34] and Zoran Stanojevic. Zoran was also the agency's
[1:38] principal driver, responsible for ferrying the women to and
[1:42] from their quote UN quote appointments.
[1:46] The plan, according to those who knew her, was to save enough
[1:49] money from this to leave the industry behind and focus
[1:52] entirely on her more mainstream entertainment career.
[1:57] The 5th of November started out ordinary enough.
[2:00] Revel had arranged to catch a train up to Newcastle to have
[2:03] lunch with her mother at the station, but she never showed.
[2:07] Her mother waited, but the train came and went without her
[2:11] daughter on it. What happened instead was this.
[2:15] At around 4:00 in the afternoon, Revel contacted her boss at
[2:20] Select Companions to confirm she'd arrived at an appointment.
[2:24] The client was a 26 year old man named Gavin Owen Samer, who
[2:29] lived on McNair Ave. and worked in a factory for his family's
[2:32] clothing business. At 5:50 PM, Revel called the
[2:37] agency again and said the appointment was over, that she
[2:40] was leaving. According to a statement Samer
[2:43] later gave to police, Revelle didn't actually leave.
[2:48] He claimed she'd entered into a private arrangement with him to
[2:51] stay longer for cash outside the agency's books.
[2:56] This would allow her to make additional money and cut the
[2:59] agency out of their cut of the action, so to speak.
[3:03] Samer told police he eventually drove her to the nearby Red
[3:06] Tomato Inn at about 7:00 PM that evening and dropped her off.
[3:11] That was reportedly the last time anyone saw Revel Balmain
[3:14] alive. Two days after Ravel vanished,
[3:18] her personal effects started turning up across the Kingsford
[3:21] area. A cork heeled platform shoe was
[3:25] found in a trash bin, or, as the sources say, a rubbish bin.
[3:30] Then her makeup bag appeared on a footpath and her diary was
[3:34] recovered from a gutter. The keys to her Bellevue Hill
[3:38] apartment were also later found nearby.
[3:41] Interestingly, these items were spread across four different
[3:45] streets, all within a short radius of Sammers McNair Ave.
[3:48] residence. People don't casually drop their
[3:52] house keys, their diary, and a shoe in separate locations
[3:56] across the suburb, At least not last I checked.
[4:00] These items were separated from each other and from their owner
[4:04] in a way that suggests something violent and chaotic.
[4:09] Revel's disappearance was reported to police, and the
[4:12] investigation eventually zeroed in on Gavineau and Samer as the
[4:16] primary person of interest. A coroner's inquest commenced in
[4:20] 1998 under NSW Deputy State Coroner John Abernethy, and in
[4:26] May 1999 he delivered his findings.
[4:30] Abernethy concluded that Revelle had been slain by a person or
[4:34] person's unknown. He noted that Gavin Samer
[4:37] certainly had the opportunity to harm her, but that no plausible
[4:41] motive had ever emerged critically.
[4:44] The inquest fell short of recommending charges, and Samer
[4:48] was never arrested. In 2008, police conducted a
[4:53] second forensic examination of the McNair Ave. property, using
[4:58] technology that hadn't been available during the original
[5:01] search. Advances in forensic science had
[5:04] opened up possibilities that simply didn't exist in 1994, and
[5:09] detectives went back through the house with fresh tools and fresh
[5:12] eyes. The results reportedly suggested
[5:16] that Revell had been slain inside the house.
[5:19] But even with improved forensic tools, the case didn't advance
[5:23] to a prosecution. The evidence wasn't enough, or
[5:27] at least not enough for the standard required in a Criminal
[5:30] Court. For nearly three decades, the
[5:33] investigation had essentially one lane Gavin Owen Samer, the
[5:39] last known client. But in September 2023, a
[5:43] television investigation aired new information that sent the
[5:47] case in a different direction entirely.
[5:50] The focus shifted to Zoran Stanojevic, the co-owner of
[5:54] Select Companions. And let's just say Zorin had his
[5:57] own troubles with the law. In December 2021, he was
[6:02] arrested on charges related to shoplifting and possession of
[6:06] stolen goods, reportedly connected to organized criminal
[6:10] activity. And honestly, who could have
[6:13] guessed that someone in such a shady business had an organized
[6:16] crime connection? Not me, that's for sure.
[6:20] That said, none of those charges were connected to Ravel's case,
[6:24] but his name was back in the frame.
[6:26] Here's the interesting thing about Zoran.
[6:29] His story shifted 10 days after Revel was reported missing.
[6:34] He told police he wasn't working the night she disappeared,
[6:37] claiming he was home with his wife, Jane, who was pregnant at
[6:41] the time. Jane would later contradict this
[6:44] account, saying that he wasn't there at all.
[6:48] There were also questions about money, and according to Jane's
[6:52] testimony at the inquest, Revel owed the agency a small sum of
[6:56] money. She had allegedly agreed to pay
[6:59] Zorin the same night that she disappeared.
[7:02] Zorin denied any knowledge of this arrangement, but a pager
[7:06] message sent to Revel's device the morning after she vanished
[7:09] told a different story. It read, in effect, that she
[7:14] should call Zorin to arrange settlement of her account.
[7:18] That pager message is haunting and it suggested that he
[7:21] potentially was providing an alibi which would suggest that
[7:25] he didn't know she was missing. In February 2024, the NSW Deputy
[7:31] State Coroner ordered a second inquest into Revels
[7:35] disappearance, which opened in April 2024.
[7:40] As of early 2026, the inquest remains unresolved and ongoing,
[7:45] apparently due to scheduling issues and issues related to
[7:48] finding some of the witnesses. Both Gavin Samer and Zoran
[7:53] Stenoyevich have drawn scrutiny, but there are reasons to
[7:57] question whether either could be directly responsible.
[8:00] In Samer's case, while he was the last confirmed person to see
[8:04] Revel Balmain, the absence of a clear motive has always been a
[8:08] major weakness. Investigators have long noted
[8:12] that opportunity alone isn't enough, and despite renewed
[8:15] forensic efforts, nothing has met the threshold required for
[8:19] charges. There's also the inherent doubt
[8:22] that someone who was on the books as being with Revel that
[8:25] night would do something like this.
[8:28] If Samer was responsible, he would have had to have known
[8:31] that he would be the prime suspect from the very start,
[8:35] which in my view makes him somewhat less likely to have
[8:38] been responsible. That said, criminals act in the
[8:42] heat of passion and quite often aren't thinking rationally at
[8:45] all. And there is the report that
[8:47] suggested that she was slain in his residence.
[8:51] Of course, that report was generated 14 years after the
[8:54] crime, which is inherently problematic from an evidentiary
[8:58] standpoint. To begin with, Zoran's situation
[9:02] is different, but equally uncertain.
[9:05] His alleged connections to organized crime and later
[9:08] charges related to stolen goods paint a troubling picture.
[9:13] Of course, I have to admit that none of those allegations are
[9:16] directly tied to the disappearance itself.
[9:19] His inconsistent statements and financial dispute with Ravel
[9:22] raised suspicion, yet they don't establish involvement.
[9:27] Zorin's reasoning for acting suspiciously may simply be
[9:31] because he was operating a business of extremely
[9:33] questionable legality. Critically, Revel operated
[9:39] within a high risk environment where off book arrangements may
[9:42] have occurred. That broader context means that
[9:46] she could have perhaps met with a second client that night that
[9:50] is so far completely flown under police radar.
[9:54] It's also always possible that she was the victim of
[9:56] trafficking, especially given that she was already working for
[10:00] someone with alleged mob connections.
[10:03] In fact, it's quite possible she was already a trafficking victim
[10:06] at the time she disappeared. We simply don't have enough
[10:09] evidence to know for certain. And that's where we stand right
[10:14] now, with two separate persons of interest who have attracted
[10:18] serious scrutiny from investigators.
[10:21] Her family has spent more than 30 years in a limbo that most of
[10:24] us can't imagine. What's left of Revel is a
[10:27] scattered collection of personal effects and far too many
[10:31] unanswered questions. Someone in Sydney knows what
[10:34] happened to Revel that evening, and so far they haven't said
[10:38] anything. At 7:00 in the morning on March
[10:44] 24th, 2020, a 65 year old criminal defense attorney kissed
[10:49] his wife goodbye. He told her he had a client
[10:52] meeting later that day. And with that, he walked out of
[10:55] her Deerfield, IL home. 17 hours later, he sent his final text
[11:00] message. And then, just like that, Barry
[11:03] Bosh's cease to exist. The only thing that remained was
[11:07] a 2015 Chevy Tahoe sitting on a quiet side street in Waukegan
[11:12] and a wife who'd never hear from her husband again.
[11:15] Six years on, every lead has gone cold, over 200 of them
[11:20] chased to dead ends. And the investigators who spent
[11:24] thousands of hours on his case now believe foul play was
[11:27] involved. Barry ran his own criminal
[11:32] defense firm, Barry Bosch's and Associates, out of an office on
[11:36] Grand Ave. in Waukegan. His practice centered on
[11:39] defending people accused of serious crimes in Lake County,
[11:43] the kind of work that puts you in rooms with people most folks
[11:46] would cross the street to avoid. He and his wife, Bayada, split
[11:51] their time between her home in Deerfield and a property in
[11:54] Antioch. By the standards of suburban
[11:57] Lake County, it was an ordinary life if you overlook the
[12:01] clientele. And the clientele, as it turned
[12:04] out, was what scared Biata the most when she reported Barry
[12:09] missing. She told the Lake County
[12:11] sheriff's deputy that she was frightened specifically because
[12:15] of the people her husband represented.
[12:18] Criminal defense attorneys who take on violent offenders don't
[12:21] just argue cases in court. They visit clients in jail.
[12:26] They learned things that dangerous people might prefer
[12:28] stayed buried. And whether that professional
[12:31] hazard caught up with Barry is a question that remains
[12:35] unanswered. And just on a personal level,
[12:38] having had friends who went into that field, I can fully confirm
[12:42] that many of them got to hear numerous things they wish they
[12:45] didn't ever know. The timeline of March 24th, 2020
[12:51] is both detailed and maddeningly incomplete.
[12:55] He told his wife he was headed to his Waukegan office and had a
[12:58] client meeting scheduled for later in the day.
[13:01] Around noon, he texted Bayada saying he was working on a
[13:05] continuing legal education program at the office.
[13:09] This is the sort of thing that lawyers need to complete a
[13:11] certain amount of hours per year to keep their law license in
[13:15] good standing. She texted back around 2 that
[13:19] afternoon looking for an update on his day, and he replied that
[13:23] he was with a client at the moment.
[13:26] Then there's a gap, and it was a long one.
[13:30] For roughly 9 hours, Barry didn't communicate with his wife
[13:34] at all. Working late isn't unusual for
[13:37] lawyers in general, and it wasn't unusual for Barry either.
[13:42] What was highly unusual is that he generally routinely kept in
[13:45] contact with his wife through text messages throughout the
[13:48] day. When he finally resurfaced via
[13:51] text around 11 that night, he told his wife that he had to
[13:55] travel for work and he was planning to stay there for the
[13:58] night. Aside from the period of
[14:01] silence, this wasn't necessarily unusual given that criminals
[14:06] don't need representation on a simple 9 to 5 schedule.
[14:10] Roughly an hour later, around midnight, someone made telephone
[14:14] contact with Barry, and that unnamed person was the last
[14:18] individual known to have communicated with him.
[14:23] Biata reported Berry missing the following day.
[14:25] On March 25th, the Lake County Sheriff's Office began their
[14:29] investigation and quickly located his Tahoe parked on a
[14:33] side street in Waukegan, about two miles from his Grand Ave.
[14:37] Law office. Berry wasn't in or around the
[14:40] vehicle, and there was no indication that anything violent
[14:44] had happened in or near that Tahoe.
[14:46] It was as though someone had simply parked the car and walked
[14:49] away, an entirely routine occurrence but for the fact
[14:54] Barry was missing. Within days, the Lake County
[14:59] Sheriff's Office made a public statement that would set the
[15:03] tone for everything that followed.
[15:06] The spokesperson described the disappearance as having unusual
[15:10] characteristics. He revealed that some people
[15:13] Barry contacted before he went missing were potentially
[15:16] troublesome. He also revealed that
[15:19] investigators felt the conversations with those people
[15:22] were potentially concerning, but he didn't elaborate on what that
[15:25] meant. He didn't name the people Barry
[15:27] had spoken to, and he didn't explain what made those
[15:31] conversations alarming. It was clear the Sheriff's
[15:35] Office already suspected this wasn't a man who'd wandered off
[15:38] for an adventure without telling his wife.
[15:42] Over the months and years that followed, the investigation
[15:45] expanded and then slowly contracted.
[15:49] Detectives with the Lake County Sheriff's Office chased more
[15:52] than 200 individual leads, and they spent thousands of combined
[15:56] man hours on the case. In September 2026, months after
[16:01] Berry vanished, the Federal Bureau of Investigation stepped
[16:05] in to provide Technical Support. The FB is involvement suggested
[16:10] the investigation had moved beyond what local resources
[16:13] could handle alone. But even federal support didn't
[16:16] break the case open, and the FBI eventually stepped back, though
[16:21] they reportedly remained available as a resource should
[16:25] the Sheriff's Office need them again.
[16:28] By the time the two year anniversary of Barry's
[16:30] disappearance arrived in early 2022, investigators acknowledged
[16:35] the case had taken many twists and turns but offered no
[16:39] concrete answers. On the 6th anniversary of his
[16:43] disappearance, the Lake County Sheriff's Office made its
[16:46] position clear and said for the first time publicly that they
[16:50] believe Barry met with foul play.
[16:53] They also said they've exhausted every lead developed over the
[16:56] course of the investigation. That's a striking pair of
[16:59] statements since law enforcement is confident a crime was
[17:03] committed but lacks the evidence to charge anyone, let alone
[17:08] secure a conviction. One of the things that really
[17:11] gets me about this case is the timing.
[17:14] March 24th, 2020, the entire world was shutting down and it
[17:20] was a time when courts were closing and offices were
[17:23] emptying. It was also a time when
[17:26] surveillance cameras were going unmonitored at a record pace.
[17:30] Given the shutdowns, it's possible that there was relevant
[17:34] evidence that was caught on camera, but that due to the
[17:38] timing, it was simply never noticed.
[17:41] It's also a time where the news cycle was completely dominated
[17:44] by world events, so Barry's case simply never got the coverage
[17:48] that could have brought more witnesses out of the woodwork.
[17:55] On January 28th, 2007, a 63 year old man sailed a 40 foot ship
[18:00] named Tenacious out of San Francisco Bay.
[18:04] He was alone heading for the Farallon Islands, about 27 miles
[18:09] past the Golden Gate, and he was planning on scattering his
[18:12] mother's ashes at sea. He called his wife, Donna
[18:16] Carnes, from the boat to let her know he was heading beyond cell
[18:19] range, and from there he faded into history.
[18:25] There were no distress signals and no activation of the boat's
[18:28] emergency position indicating radio beacon, a device designed
[18:32] to trigger automatically if a vessel capsizes or sinks.
[18:37] The Pacific simply swallowed him, his boat, and every trace
[18:41] that either had ever been there. And here's the thing, while he
[18:46] wasn't well known outside his field, Jim was one of the most
[18:49] important people in the history of computer science.
[18:54] In the world of computer science, Jim was as close to
[18:57] intellectual royalty as possible.
[19:00] In 1998, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded him
[19:04] the Turing Award, which is the field's equivalent of a Nobel
[19:07] Prize. He received it for his
[19:10] foundational work on database and transaction processing, the
[19:14] kind of deeply technical research that makes essentially
[19:17] every digital system that handles money function.
[19:21] His career touched nearly every major landmark company in the
[19:24] computing industry, working at IBM, Microsoft, and many other
[19:28] leading companies. If you've ever completed an
[19:32] online purchase without the system crashing halfway through,
[19:35] you've benefited from his work, whether you knew it or not.
[19:39] Gray was reportedly A deeply engaged person, generous with
[19:43] his time, and known for mentoring younger researchers.
[19:47] By all accounts, he was a happy, fulfilled individual, and on top
[19:51] of that, he'd recently become a grandfather.
[19:54] His daughter later said he was the most content she'd ever seen
[19:57] him in the period before his disappearance.
[20:00] There was no note, no indication of personal distress, no reason
[20:04] at all to believe he wanted to be anywhere other than back at
[20:07] the dock. By evening, the Coast Guard
[20:11] launched its standard operation and planes, helicopters and
[20:14] boats swept the waters off San Francisco for four days.
[20:19] They eventually covered roughly 132,000 square miles of ocean,
[20:24] but didn't find a single thing. When the official search was
[20:28] suspended, the technology community refused to accept it.
[20:33] What followed was, by any measure, one of the most
[20:37] extraordinary civilian search efforts ever organized.
[20:41] Engineers from companies that were normally bitter competitors
[20:44] dropped what they were doing. People from Microsoft, Google,
[20:48] Oracle and Amazon worked side by side.
[20:52] Digital Globe, the company that provides satellite imagery for
[20:56] Google Maps and Google Earth, volunteered one of its
[20:59] satellites to photograph the search area from orbit.
[21:02] NASA diverted an ER 2 aircraft, the civilian variant of the U2
[21:07] spy plane, to capture high altitude imagery of the ocean
[21:11] surface. Friends and colleagues chartered
[21:14] private planes and flew over the water themselves, scanning with
[21:18] binoculars and cameras. Then came the part that nobody
[21:21] had ever tried before. Engineers at Amazon took the
[21:26] satellite and aerial images, slice them into hundreds of
[21:29] thousands of small tiles, each showing a 300 by 300m patch of
[21:34] ocean. They then uploaded them to
[21:37] Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform where users complete
[21:40] small digital tasks. Within days, roughly 12,000
[21:45] volunteers from around the world had joined what became known as
[21:50] the Jim Gray Group. Together they worked through
[21:53] more than 560,000 individual images, scanning each one for
[21:59] any sign of a red hulled sailboat.
[22:02] It was one of the first large scale applications of
[22:04] crowdsourcing for a search and rescue operation.
[22:08] And the cruel irony wasn't lost on anyone.
[22:12] The systems underpinning this effort, the databases, the
[22:15] distributed computing, the large scale data processing were
[22:20] technologies Jim Gray had spent his life advancing.
[22:25] The prevailing theory among marine experts is
[22:27] straightforward and grim. Gray's boat was a design that's
[22:31] reportedly vulnerable to hull damage, and the waters near the
[22:35] Farallon Islands are full of drifting debris.
[22:38] A collision with a submerged object could have punched a hole
[22:41] in the hull, and a boat like his could take on water and sink in
[22:45] as little as 30 seconds. If Gray was below deck when it
[22:50] happened, he wouldn't have had time to send a distress call or
[22:53] grab safety equipment. The emergency transponder, which
[22:57] should activate on contact with water, may have been damaged or
[23:01] destroyed before it could transmit.
[23:04] Other theories have surfaced over the years, and some have
[23:07] speculated that Gray chose to disappear, sailing off to start
[23:12] a new life somewhere. But this doesn't hold up under
[23:15] any scrutiny. He was wealthy, successful,
[23:19] happily married, and had a new grandchild.
[23:22] His colleagues described him as enthusiastic about ongoing
[23:26] research projects, and while he had the means, there was simply
[23:30] no motive. Some people have also floated
[23:33] the idea of foul play, perhaps connected to his technical
[23:37] knowledge, but there's no evidence to support this.
[23:41] It's entirely possible that this did occur, but as I said,
[23:45] there's simply no evidence whatsoever to suggest that this
[23:48] is what happened. On January 28th, 2012, exactly
[23:54] five years after he sailed out of San Francisco Bay, a court
[23:57] granted his wife's petition to have Jim Gray declared legally
[24:01] dead. The five year waiting period is
[24:03] standard in California for missing persons when no body has
[24:07] been recovered. It was a legal formality, but it
[24:11] also represented something grimmer, the final
[24:14] acknowledgement that he wasn't coming back.
[24:18] The thing that sticks with me about this case is that the
[24:20] greatest concentration of technical talent on the planet
[24:24] tried to find one man on the ocean, and they couldn't do it.
[24:28] They had satellites, literal spy planes, sonar, a massive degree
[24:34] of crowdsourcing, unlimited funding, and the collective will
[24:39] of an entire industry. Despite all that, the Pacific
[24:43] Ocean is simply too vast, and it's continued to guard the
[24:47] secret of what happened to this pioneering computer scientist.
[24:54] What's up everyone? It's Jimmy here with that usual
[24:57] reminder to hit the subscribe button and the notification bell
[25:01] and turn on all notifications. Also, don't forget to consider
[25:06] checking out the membership or the Patreon if you feel like
[25:09] taking your support for my show to the next level.
[25:16] Shergar, arguably the most famous racehorse on the planet,
[25:20] vanished from his stable in rural Ireland in the middle of
[25:23] the night. The full truth of what happened
[25:26] to him has never been established, beyond the claims
[25:29] of a handful of informants and anonymous sources whose accounts
[25:33] don't always line up. It remains one of the strangest
[25:36] unsolved crimes of the 20th century, a case where the victim
[25:40] couldn't speak and where the police only arrived when the
[25:43] horse was literally out of the barn.
[25:47] In June 1981, the three-year old colt lined up for the Epsom
[25:51] Darby under a 19 year old jockey named Walter Swinburne.
[25:55] Shergar won by 10 lengths, the largest winning margin in the
[25:59] race's history going back over 200 years.
[26:03] Over the weeks that followed, Shergar went on to win the Irish
[26:06] Derby by 4 lengths and then the King George the 6th and Queen
[26:10] Elizabeth Stakes by another four.
[26:13] He was, without any serious argument, the most dominant
[26:17] racehorse of his generation and everyone in the racing world
[26:21] knew it. His owner, the Aga Khan, retired
[26:25] him to stud at the end of that year and syndicated him for
[26:29] £10,000,000 across 40 shares at 250,000 lbs each.
[26:35] There'd been an offer from American breeders reportedly
[26:38] worth around $40 million, but the Aga Khan turned it down,
[26:43] preferring to keep the horse in Ireland.
[26:46] Sugar took up residence at Ballymeny Ranch in County
[26:49] Kildare, where in theory he'd generate 10s of millions in
[26:53] breeding fees over the course of his lifetime.
[26:58] On the evening of February 8th, 1983, 3 armed men wearing
[27:03] balaclavas arrived at the home of Jim Fitzgerald, the head
[27:07] groom at Ballymeny. His family were locked into a
[27:10] room in the house while the men told him plainly that they'd
[27:14] come for sure. Gar Fitzgerald was marched to
[27:18] the stallion stable at gunpoint and forced to load the horse
[27:21] into a waiting horse trailer. And as an aside, in researching
[27:26] this case, I learned that horse trailers are called Horse boxes
[27:30] on the other side of the pond, and I will now forever be
[27:34] calling them Horse boxes. From there, the gang drove
[27:39] Fitzgerald around for roughly 4 hours before releasing him near
[27:43] a small village about 20 miles from the ranch.
[27:47] He made his way to a local police station but by then the
[27:51] horse in the horse box had dissolved into the Irish
[27:53] countryside. It would be roughly 8 hours from
[27:57] the moment of the theft before the Gardai Ireland's National
[28:01] Police were fully alerted and operational on the case.
[28:06] The gang demanded a ransom of £2,000,000 and negotiations
[28:10] reportedly took place over the following days.
[28:13] But the syndicate members couldn't agree on how to
[28:15] respond. 34 different shareholders spread across
[28:20] multiple countries had to somehow coordinate a position on
[28:24] whether to pay. They also couldn't verify that
[28:28] the people contacting them actually had the horse, and they
[28:31] couldn't agree on who had the authority to make decisions for
[28:34] the syndicate. The thieves, for their part,
[28:38] grew frustrated with the lack of progress and after roughly 4
[28:42] days, communication stopped entirely.
[28:46] Importantly, nay proof of life was sent during this period and
[28:50] it wasn't even confirmed that Shergar was still in Ireland at
[28:53] the time. The police effort that followed
[28:57] was plagued with problems from the start.
[28:59] The theft happened to coincide with one of Ireland's major
[29:03] horse auction events. That meant the roads of Kildare
[29:06] and surrounding counties were packed with horse boxes.
[29:09] That night, the horse box carrying Shergar vanished into a
[29:13] flood of identical looking vehicles and by the time anyone
[29:17] was looking for it, it could have been anywhere on the
[29:20] island. There were also jurisdictional
[29:23] tensions that made things even worse, with two police forces
[29:26] allegedly engaging in glory seeking behavior rather than
[29:30] cooperation. The Dublin based Gardai and the
[29:34] Kildare based gardai were both on the case but by various
[29:38] accounts weren't sharing information effectively with one
[29:42] another. The investigation attracted
[29:45] enormous international media attention which the police were
[29:49] utterly unprepared for. The scrutiny was intense and the
[29:53] tips were overwhelming, but the actual leads were few.
[29:57] There was a sting attempt in July of 1983 when a veterinarian
[30:02] who'd been Shergar's vet assisted the gardai in an
[30:05] operation that involved placing ransom money in a remote
[30:09] village. Their plan was to dump a large
[30:12] sum of cash into the trunk of a car, with the horse snappers
[30:16] coming to retrieve the cash and dropping off the horse.
[30:19] As it turned out, the money was stolen from the car overnight,
[30:23] and the supposed kidnappers never materialized.
[30:27] The detective involved was later dismissed from the force for
[30:30] breaching regulations, with some unproven allegations made about
[30:34] the whole thing being an inside job to steal the money.
[30:38] The full affair was an embarrassment, and it brought
[30:41] the investigation no closer to finding the missing horse.
[30:47] Years later, a revelation surfaced.
[30:49] The gardai had reportedly been warned months in advance that a
[30:52] plan was in motion to steal a valuable racehorse for ransom.
[30:57] A trusted informant had provided specific details about the plot
[31:01] and even named some of the people involved.
[31:05] Over the years, a picture has emerged through informants and
[31:09] investigative journalism that points heavily toward a certain
[31:12] well known Irish group as the perpetrators.
[31:16] The most prominent account came from Sean O'Callaghan, a former
[31:20] IRA member who became an informant for the Irish
[31:23] government. In his 1999 autobiography,
[31:28] O'Callaghan laid out his version of events.
[31:32] He claimed the operation had been masterminded by Kevin
[31:34] Mallon, a senior figure in the organization who reportedly
[31:38] conceived the plan while serving time in prison.
[31:42] The logic, according to O'Callaghan, was extremely
[31:45] straightforward. Kidnapping a horse for ransom
[31:48] would generate funding without provoking the same public
[31:50] backlash that kidnapping a person would.
[31:53] The organization needed money to fund their operations, and
[31:57] Shergar was quite literally worth more than his weight in
[32:00] gold at the end of the day. So the logic went, a few
[32:06] extremely wealthy people would fork over their share of the 2
[32:09] million and the horse would be back in his stable, safe and
[32:13] sound. What reportedly went wrong was
[32:16] the horse himself, since Shergar was a high strung thoroughbred
[32:19] stallion, not a cooperative hostage.
[32:24] According to O'callaghan's account, the horse panicked
[32:27] after being moved and injured his leg.
[32:30] The gang had no veterinary expertise and no way to manage a
[32:33] distressed animal of that size and temperament.
[32:37] When the ransom negotiations collapsed, Mallon reportedly
[32:41] concluded that releasing the horse was too risky because of
[32:44] the surveillance he believed he was under.
[32:47] Mallon allegedly ordered Sugar to be eliminated approximately 4
[32:51] days after the kidnapping after it became clear his condition
[32:55] wasn't getting better. Notably though, there's a number
[32:59] of reasons to doubt O'callaghan's claim, the primary
[33:03] one being that he brought absolutely no evidence to the
[33:06] table to verify it. He also didn't claim to be
[33:09] involved in the horse heist directly, and claimed to only
[33:12] know about it from the people who were involved.
[33:15] He also gave very different accounts of the story over the
[33:18] years and attempted to use the story to sell a book.
[33:23] There's also a speculative theory that he may have been
[33:26] hired to put up a smokescreen for the true kidnappers.
[33:30] The story of a super horse on Irish soil being horse heisted
[33:33] by one of the most famous groups in the world seemed a bit too
[33:37] perfect for some observers. Some theorize that the horse had
[33:42] been stolen by a group that intended to use him to breed
[33:45] race horses. However, this idea is inherently
[33:49] problematic given that the lineage of every major race
[33:53] horse is well known, which would cause issues of parentage for
[33:57] the offspring. The legendary remains of this
[34:01] stolen horse have never been found, but there's been
[34:04] speculation over the years about burial sites across Ireland.
[34:08] No forensic evidence has ever surfaced in the case of Shergar.
[34:12] Remains officially open and unsolved.
[34:18] She bought a few packets of rat poison from the local store,
[34:22] smiling politely, explaining she had a problem with mice.
[34:26] She signed the poison register as required by law, her own name
[34:30] and her own handwriting, and walked home to turn her lane in
[34:34] Ashton. Under Lyne, she had enough
[34:37] strychnine and arsenic to wipe out an entire colony of rodents.
[34:41] But here's the thing, there were never really any rodents.
[34:46] Within three months, three people would perish and Marianne
[34:49] would have her ticket for a state sponsored appointment with
[34:52] the Grim Reaper himself. Marianne Brittland was born
[34:57] Marianne Haig in 1847 and her early years looked like those of
[35:02] thousands of other working class women in industrial Lancashire.
[35:06] By the time she was 14, she was already working full time as a
[35:10] laborer in a cotton mill. She married Thomas Brittland, a
[35:14] cart driver who also worked as a bartender at the Heaps Vaults on
[35:18] Old Street. Together they had children and
[35:21] settled into a rented house at 133 Turner Lane.
[35:26] Mary Ann held two jobs herself, working the factory floor during
[35:30] the day and pulling pints as a barmaid at night.
[35:34] It was an unremarkable existence in a town built on cotton and
[35:38] coal, where people worked long hours and didn't expect much
[35:42] beyond survival. Nobody on Turner Lane in 1885
[35:46] had any reason to suspect that one of their neighbors was about
[35:50] to become a serial poisoner. At some point in late 1885 or
[35:56] early 1886, Mary Anne began an affair with her neighbor, Thomas
[36:00] Dixon. The Dixons live just across the
[36:03] street from the Britland House on Turner Lane.
[36:06] Thomas Dixon's wife, Mary, was 29 years old and reportedly had
[36:11] no idea what was going on between her husband and the
[36:15] woman who lived a few doors down.
[36:18] The affair wasn't just a fling for Mary Anne.
[36:20] She wanted Thomas Dixon permanently.
[36:23] She wanted to marry him, and she was apparently willing to clear
[36:27] every obstacle in her path to make that happen.
[36:31] The first obstacle, strangely enough, wasn't her husband, but
[36:35] her own daughter. Marianne reportedly believed
[36:39] that 19 year old Elizabeth suspected her mother's affair
[36:42] with Dixon and might expose it. Whether Elizabeth actually knew
[36:47] anything, or whether this was paranoia on Marianne's part, we
[36:50] don't know. But in Marianne's mind, her
[36:54] eldest daughter had become a threat to the new life she was
[36:57] building, and that was enough. Sometime in early March 1886,
[37:04] Elizabeth Hannah Brittland fell violently.
[37:06] I'll A doctor was called, but he attributed Elizabeth's illness
[37:11] and eventual passing to natural causes.
[37:14] Marianne promptly collected 10 lbs on Elizabeth's life
[37:18] insurance policy and Elizabeth was buried shortly after with
[37:22] nobody suspecting foul play. With Elizabeth gone, Marianne
[37:27] turned her attention to the next obstacle.
[37:30] Her husband Thomas Brittland, 44 years old, died on the 3rd of
[37:36] May 1886 and the attending doctor diagnosed epilepsy as the
[37:41] cause of death. Once again, the symptoms had
[37:45] been violent and sudden, but Victorian medicine wasn't always
[37:49] precise. As usual, Marianne collected on
[37:53] another insurance policy, suggesting a strong secondary
[37:57] motive for these disturbing acts.
[38:01] After Thomas Brittland's death, Marianne and her surviving
[38:05] daughter were invited to stay with the Dixons at 128 Turner
[38:09] Lane. It was a gesture of kindness
[38:12] from Mary Dixon, who apparently felt sympathy for her newly
[38:16] widowed neighbor. Marianne was now living under
[38:19] the same roof as Thomas Dixon, which was exactly where she
[38:22] wanted to be, but there was still one person in the way.
[38:27] On the 14th of May 1886, Mary Dixon became violently ill and
[38:33] passed away the same day. But this time, somebody noticed.
[38:39] The suspicious circumstances surrounding Mary Dixon's death
[38:43] prompted local authorities to act.
[38:45] A post mortem examination was conducted the following day and
[38:49] the results were damning. Medical examiner's found lethal
[38:53] quantities of both strychnine and arsenic in Mary Dixon's
[38:57] stomach and tissues. The police began investigating
[39:00] immediately, and they didn't have to look far.
[39:04] Authorities ordered the exhumation of Elizabeth
[39:07] Brittland's body and Thomas Brittland's body.
[39:11] Both were exhumed on the 16th of June 1886, and chemical analysis
[39:16] confirmed poisoning in both cases.
[39:19] Marianne Brittland was arrested and so was Thomas Dixon,
[39:23] initially on suspicion that he'd been involved in his own wife's
[39:26] poisoning, but the investigation eventually cleared Dixon of any
[39:31] role in the poisonings. Despite his involvement in the
[39:35] affair, Marianne Brittland stood trial on the 22nd of July 1886
[39:41] at Manchester Assizes. Although all three deaths were
[39:45] presented as evidence, the actual charge tried was the
[39:48] poisoning of Mary Dixon. Elizabeth and Thomas Brittland
[39:53] were introduced to demonstrate a pattern of behavior and to
[39:57] counter any defense claim that the poisoning could have been
[40:00] accidental. The prosecution's case was
[40:03] methodical and overwhelming. A physician presented his
[40:06] findings on the presence of poison in all three victims
[40:09] bodies. The poison register which she
[40:13] had to sign to make these purchases showed Marianne's
[40:16] purchases in her own handwriting in advance of each poisoning.
[40:21] There was no evidence of any mice in any of the properties
[40:24] she'd lived in which demolished her.
[40:26] Stated reason for buying the poison in the 1st place.
[40:30] And the motive was clear. She'd been having an affair with
[40:33] Thomas Dixon and wanted to remove everyone standing between
[40:37] her and the life she imagined with him.
[40:41] The defense, for their part, simply said that Marianne had no
[40:45] motive for doing what she did, which strikes me as something of
[40:49] a Hail Mary pass. Despite the clear and obvious
[40:53] nature of the evidence, the jury ended up deliberating well into
[40:57] the night, an unusual outcome for the time, before ultimately
[41:02] coming back with a guilty verdict.
[41:05] Marianne responded by telling the court they had got it all
[41:08] wrong, but she would change her tune shortly after and confess
[41:12] everything to her mother and her surviving daughter.
[41:16] On the morning of August 9th, just weeks after her conviction,
[41:21] Britlin faced her appointment with the gallows.
[41:25] The Britlin case raises uncomfortable questions about
[41:28] how deaths were certified. In the late 19th century, 2
[41:32] doctors attributed violent, sudden deaths to natural causes
[41:36] and epilepsy without performing autopsies or toxicology tests.
[41:41] The third death only triggered scrutiny because the pattern had
[41:46] become impossible to ignore. If Mary Ann had stopped after
[41:50] two victims, she might never have been caught and it was her
[41:54] own compulsive repetition that brought the whole thing down.
[41:59] It makes me question how many so-called natural deaths of the
[42:02] era may have been misattributed rather than something much more
[42:07] sinister.

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