# These Cases Are Too Disturbing For Television | 260

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 20 Jun 2026, 39 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/10f1e70d4/podcast/play/121734482/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-5-20%2F426485345-44100-2-f89446d8c3793.mp3

Join me for some of the most chilling cases imaginable. Episode 260 of the true crime podcast. As usual, don't forget to rate and follow if you enjoy my podcast. 👇 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, serial killers, cold case, true crime for sleep, sleep stories, sleep podcast, relaxing podcast, disturbing

## Transcript

[0:00] On a clear spring afternoon in 1977, on a Salt Lake City street
[0:05] lined with houses and shops, an 18 year old left her classroom
[0:09] building and started toward home.
[0:12] Somewhere in those few minutes in the middle of the day, on a
[0:16] walk that should have taken 10 minutes, she vanished.
[0:20] No one saw a struggle, and no one heard so much as a scream.
[0:24] When her remains were found two days later, what they found told
[0:28] investigators she'd already been held somewhere else first.
[0:33] Elaine Briggs had grown up on a cattle ranch outside Dillon, a
[0:36] small town in southwestern Montana.
[0:40] Born in September of 1958, she'd come down to Salt Lake City to
[0:44] study court reporting at the LDS Business College, working toward
[0:48] a steady career taking down testimony in courtrooms.
[0:52] By the spring of 1977, she was 18, sharing an apartment with
[0:57] several other young women, and by every account, she was
[1:00] reserved and almost compulsively punctual.
[1:04] The people who knew her would tell investigators the same
[1:07] thing over and over. On the day after she
[1:09] disappeared, the lane didn't flake out, and she wouldn't have
[1:13] climbed into a car with someone she didn't know.
[1:17] She was also in the middle of a personal upheaval.
[1:20] A few weeks earlier, she'd ended her engagement to a young man
[1:24] who, like her, had come from Dylan.
[1:28] The two had stayed in contact even after the breakup, and the
[1:32] relationship had reportedly frayed over faith.
[1:36] She was a devoted member of the Mormon church and wanted that
[1:39] life for her future family. Her former fiance didn't share
[1:44] the same conviction, and according to what he later told
[1:47] police, the two of them had it out one last time on a late
[1:51] night phone call days before she disappeared.
[1:56] The morning of Thursday, May 5th started like any other and
[1:59] Velain left the apartment around 9:30 for the short walk to
[2:03] campus. Her class ran until 11/20 and
[2:07] afterwards she had plans for the rest of the day.
[2:10] She was supposed to meet a roommate back at the apartment
[2:13] around noon so the two of them could head to the Crossroads
[2:16] Mall downtown. Several classmates confirmed she
[2:20] made it to the lecture, and one of them even walked down the
[2:23] stairs with her when the class was over.
[2:27] At the bottom of the steps, they said their goodbyes and headed
[2:30] off in different directions. Notably, this witness statement
[2:34] came from just one day after the disappearance, so I consider
[2:38] this absolutely rock solid eyewitness evidence.
[2:41] That was the last confirmed sighting of Valeen Briggs, and
[2:45] noon came and went. Her roommate waited, then waited
[2:49] some more. For a young woman this reliable,
[2:53] every passing minute felt a little more wrong, as if
[2:57] something terrible had happened. As the afternoon wore on, the
[3:01] roommate started making calls, first of Elaine's ex fiance and
[3:06] then long distance to her parents in Montana, who hadn't
[3:10] heard from her either. An uncle who lived locally in
[3:13] Utah filed a missing persons report that night around 11:15.
[3:20] Now, I know you're expecting the cops to have done nothing here,
[3:23] but by the standards of 1977, what happened next was actually
[3:28] fairly diligent. Within a day, Salt Lake City
[3:32] police had put out a bulletin to neighboring agencies, confirmed
[3:36] she'd attended her class, and started working the phones.
[3:40] They contacted hospitals, cab companies and bus lines, hoping
[3:45] someone had seen her. They went door to door through
[3:48] her neighborhood with her photograph, but every Ave. came
[3:52] up empty. When her parents drove down from
[3:55] Montana, they sat with detectives and laid out the kind
[3:59] of portrait that would shape the whole investigation.
[4:02] Their daughter, they insisted, would never have climbed into a
[4:06] vehicle by force or out of fear without putting up a tremendous
[4:10] fight. She was athletic and she wasn't
[4:12] easily intimidated, and she wouldn't have hitchhiked or gone
[4:16] off with a stranger on a whim. The tragic answer to the first
[4:20] part of the mystery where Valeen was came on the evening of May
[4:24] 7th. Up in Lambs Canyon, in the
[4:27] mountains east of the city, a group of teenage boys out
[4:31] exploring stumbled onto something.
[4:34] It was the body of a young woman at the bottom of a steep slope
[4:37] near a stream. They ran, argued among
[4:40] themselves about whether they'd be blamed, and finally decided
[4:44] they had to tell someone. A detective drove the boys back
[4:48] up the Canyon, and they led him straight to where Vilain had
[4:51] been dumped. What investigators found was
[4:55] disturbing in its detail. Her wrists had been bound
[4:58] together, with a woman stocking her ankles the same way.
[5:03] Then all four had been cinched together with a black belt
[5:06] patterned with flowers. There was a thin ligature line
[5:10] running from behind both ears, across the front of her throat,
[5:14] fainter toward the back of the neck, the kind of mark left when
[5:18] a cord is pulled from behind. She had patterns of bruising
[5:23] that indicated that she must have put up a substantial fight
[5:26] against the attacker. Detectives determined that she'd
[5:30] likely been restrained somewhere else before being brought to
[5:33] that location. Her belongings were scattered as
[5:37] far as 30 feet away. Jeans, a blouse, a jacket,
[5:42] undergarments, shoes, a notepad, some keys and textbooks.
[5:49] From the careless way it was all strewn down the hillside, it
[5:52] looked as though someone had simply pitched it over the edge
[5:55] from the road above. The autopsy was performed on May
[5:59] 8th, and the medical examiner ruled the cause was ligature
[6:03] strangulation, likely from a cord or rope.
[6:07] Notably, while detectives initially thought she'd been
[6:10] subjected to a further form of assault, the evidence on the
[6:14] autopsy came back inconclusive. However, what they were able to
[6:19] pull from her body was hair, presumably from the attacker.
[6:24] Soon, the cops looked to every man in her orbit and three names
[6:28] rose to the surface. The first was an elderly man,
[6:31] around 65, who lived in Velain's building and made the young
[6:36] women there deeply uncomfortable, leering and
[6:39] calling out to them as they passed.
[6:42] He had no alibi for May 5th, claiming he'd been home alone
[6:46] all day, and he carried a long criminal record that included
[6:50] the worst offenses imaginable. When detectives searched his
[6:54] camper, they found rope, potentially the same kind that
[6:58] was used for the ligature. When they searched his
[7:01] apartment, they found women's underwear in the trash.
[7:05] He sat for a polygraph, passed it, and handed over hair samples
[7:09] that didn't match what was found at the scene.
[7:13] With the forensic tools of the 1970s, that was as far as he
[7:17] could be pushed at that moment. Now, I will say, for these hair
[7:22] samples, we don't have any great detail on them or why they were
[7:26] specifically believed to be from the attacker.
[7:30] It's possible that the samples didn't come from the assailant,
[7:33] despite what the detectives thought, which complicates
[7:36] matters. That said, since it's an open
[7:40] investigation, I'm of course working with an incomplete
[7:43] evidentiary record. The second was a young
[7:47] instructor at the college, only 24, who worked as a court
[7:51] reporter by day and taught in the evenings.
[7:54] He'd taken a noticeable interest in her, dropping by the ice
[7:58] cream shop where she worked part time and phoning her at home
[8:01] more than once, behavior her classmates noticed and found
[8:05] odd. He was also married and had a
[8:08] family, presenting himself as an upright family man.
[8:13] He admitted he and Valane had talked about her on again off
[8:16] again engagement, but insisted their relationship never went
[8:20] past teacher and student. He had a reasonable alibi at his
[8:24] day job and detectives largely took it at face value, but they
[8:29] never searched his home or asked him to take a polygraph.
[8:33] The third was her ex fiance and his behavior was originally read
[8:37] as somewhat unusual by detectives.
[8:40] He'd gone out searching the canyons with his father almost
[8:43] immediately, and when asked why he had a potentially concerning
[8:47] answer, he reportedly said that if anything had happened to her,
[8:52] she'd probably end up in a Canyon.
[8:54] A grim leap to make while everyone else still clung to the
[8:57] hope that she was alive. However, as it turned out, him
[9:02] and his father had simply been looking absolutely everywhere.
[9:06] Further, the police seemed to treat this as some sort of
[9:09] uncanny prediction, since she was ultimately recovered from
[9:13] that Canyon dump site. Now, personally, I don't think
[9:17] it takes Sherlock Holmes to figure out that a criminal might
[9:20] take an endangered person's remains to a desolate area, but
[9:24] hey, that's just me. He also had an alibi, since he'd
[9:29] been working a shift as a cook at a hotel that day at the time
[9:32] she disappeared, and his supervisor and numerous others
[9:36] backed him up. He declined A polygraph, though
[9:40] it remains unclear to me if that was on a lawyer's advice or not.
[9:44] His declining the polygraph meant that detectives at the
[9:46] time weren't willing to immediately rule him out,
[9:49] despite his alibi. And of course, polygraphs aren't
[9:52] accurate whatsoever. And even if you're not guilty,
[9:56] there's plenty of reasons to not want to take one.
[10:00] For instance, if he had failed the polygraph test due to
[10:03] anxiety but was innocent, taking that test could have potentially
[10:08] halted a proper investigation. Polygraphs are an absolute meme
[10:13] of an investigative tool and they really only work on people
[10:17] who think they're actually lie detectors.
[10:21] The ex fiance was eventually ruled out as a potential suspect
[10:24] and cold case detectives have recently reaffirmed they don't
[10:27] believe he was involved whatsoever.
[10:30] Honestly seems fairly obvious to me that he couldn't have been in
[10:34] two places at once. And this is another case of
[10:37] detectives getting caught up on a polygraph refusal.
[10:42] In June, the Sheriff's Office shipped some 20 pieces of
[10:45] evidence to the FBI crime lab in Washington.
[10:49] Examiner's lifted dozens of latent fingerprints and several
[10:52] palm prints from items near the body, but this was long before
[10:56] national fingerprint databases existed.
[11:00] Unfortunately, at some point afterward, this evidence was
[11:04] lost, and detectives have spent years asking the FBI to track
[11:07] them down. But so far, no one has.
[11:13] A month later, the case briefly flared back to life when a
[11:15] teenage hitchhiker turned up in Montana carrying identification
[11:19] with Vilain's name on it. For a moment, it seemed like a
[11:23] break, but it turned out it wasn't.
[11:26] It was a forgery bought from a man in Salt Lake City who made
[11:30] fakes, and the name had simply been lifted from Vilain's
[11:33] published obituary. The forger had the habit of
[11:37] picking the names of deceased individuals to lower the risk
[11:40] that anyone would notice what he was up to.
[11:44] The case sat cold for decades, and then in the 20 tens, the
[11:48] science finally started to catch up.
[11:51] Newer testing of the old evidence produced DNA, but not
[11:55] the clean answer everyone wanted.
[11:57] What came back was a mix of two or more unknown male profiles
[12:01] tangled together. This was complicated by the very
[12:05] real chance that investigators in 1977 had been sloppy and
[12:10] contaminated the evidence. Two of the original persons of
[12:14] interest, the elderly neighbor and the young instructor, have
[12:19] since been partially excluded through that genetic evidence.
[12:23] And I say partially excluded here because it remains unclear
[12:28] if either one or both of these samples are simply the result of
[12:31] sloppy handling of the evidence. Perhaps more importantly, both
[12:36] men are now deceased, so if they were involved, they're beyond
[12:40] the reach of American justice. As for the ex fiance who was
[12:44] once a suspect, despite the fact that they were broken up at the
[12:48] time, he continues to seek justice for Vallain.
[12:53] Cold case detectives currently believe Vallain got into a car
[12:56] that afternoon willingly with someone she knew well enough to
[13:00] trust. Personally, I think this rules
[13:04] out the creepy elderly neighbor, since I doubt she would have got
[13:08] into a vehicle willingly with him.
[13:11] Ultimately though, it appears that her entire social circle
[13:15] was never really fully investigated at the time.
[13:18] She likely had dozens of social connections at university, from
[13:22] other students to teachers, and she was also a devout member of
[13:26] the Mormon church. She also worked part time,
[13:30] bringing her in contact with even more people who she may
[13:33] have trusted. But all that said, I have a
[13:37] theory on this one, and I tend to think that the person
[13:41] responsible for the attack wasn't actually anyone close to
[13:44] her. My reason for this comes from a
[13:47] distinct bit of evidence. The dump site used by the
[13:50] criminal Salt Lake City in the 1970s was surrounded by a ton of
[13:55] wilderness and desolate areas, places that could hide A body
[13:59] for years. We know that Velain wasn't taken
[14:02] to the site where she was found right away, that she was dumped
[14:06] there later. That means that this likely
[14:09] wasn't just a haphazard choice of a location, but rather some
[14:14] thought must have gone into it. Anyone who was local would have
[14:17] known the site where she was ultimately dumped off wasn't
[14:20] actually a great place to hide the body.
[14:23] However, to someone from out of state, it may have looked like
[14:26] the middle of nowhere. This is circumstantial, of
[14:29] course, but I think this piece of evidence distinctly points
[14:32] away from any of the established suspects.
[14:36] This brings me to my final point on the case, because I think
[14:39] there's a very good chance that it gets solved in the near
[14:41] future if the genetic evidence that was found isn't
[14:44] contaminated. This seems like an obvious case
[14:48] where genetic genealogy could lead to a significant
[14:50] breakthrough in the near future. For about 5 hours on a cold
[14:58] afternoon in 1989, a young man stood inside a suburban pizza
[15:02] shop with a loaded revolver, 2 terrified employees and a
[15:06] grievance that made no sense. He fired rounds into the ceiling
[15:11] and he demanded a fortune and a getaway car.
[15:14] But in the end, he wasn't there for the money.
[15:17] He was there because of a bizarre character wearing a
[15:20] rabbit suit, a mascot used to sell a certain pizza chains
[15:24] marinara manhole covers. The man's name was Kenneth Noid,
[15:29] and the mascot on television that winter, the one Domino's
[15:33] kept telling everyone to avoid, was also called the Noid.
[15:38] As far as Ken was concerned, that wasn't a coincidence.
[15:42] It was a message aimed straight at him.
[15:45] Here, the unsolved mystery isn't directly about the crime itself,
[15:49] but what happened afterwards. In the mid 1980s, Domino's was
[15:55] locked in a delivery battle with the sit down chains like Pizza
[15:58] Hut. The fear it had to fight was a
[16:01] specific one. Plenty of customers assumed that
[16:04] a delivered pizza was a cold pizza.
[16:08] The company needed to put a face on that worry so it could
[16:10] promise to beat it. Its whole pitch was speed, a hot
[16:15] pizza at your door in 30 minutes or less.
[16:17] And it needed a way to dramatize everything that could go wrong
[16:20] on the trip there. So an advertising agency dreamed
[16:24] up a villain who really wanted you not to have a hot and fresh
[16:27] pizza. The name itself was a play on
[16:30] the word annoyed, which was more or less the entire point of the
[16:34] campaign. What they built was genuinely
[16:38] bizarre. The Noid was a buck toothed, pot
[16:41] bellied figure stuffed into a skin tight red Bunny costume,
[16:45] and his entire purpose in life was to wreck your dinner.
[16:48] He'd freeze pizzas, smash them, and Pogo across the boxes doing
[16:53] whatever it took to make sure your order showed up cold and
[16:56] ruined. The studio that animated him and
[16:59] Clay was the same one behind the dancing California raisins.
[17:04] The thing caught fire. The Noid landed on T-shirts and
[17:08] lunch boxes and even headlined in his own video game.
[17:12] Though to be fair, it was just a reskin of a Japanese game about
[17:16] a ninja for a few years in the late 80s.
[17:20] Avoid the Noid was the kind of slogan that everyone knew, and
[17:25] it all seemed like harmless fun. Enter Kenny Noid, who was 22 and
[17:31] living in the Atlanta area. By the accounts of the people
[17:35] who knew him, he'd struggled with mental health for some
[17:38] time, and the commercials had gotten under his skin in a way
[17:42] his family found hard to explain.
[17:45] He didn't see a weird annoying marketing gimmick, he saw
[17:48] himself in the bizarre mascot, that he inspired it, and that he
[17:53] was to be avoided like the Noid. Somewhere in his thinking, the
[17:59] cartoon stopped being a coincidence of names and became
[18:03] proof that the Domino's founder had it out for him personally.
[18:07] He decided the company had stolen his name and built an
[18:10] entire marketing empire just to humiliate him in front of the
[18:13] whole country. It got darker than that, though,
[18:17] and this is the part that makes it extremely clear that Ken was
[18:20] very much unwell. He had become convinced that
[18:23] someone connected to the pizza chain was getting into his
[18:26] apartment when he wasn't home, letting themselves in and
[18:29] sniffing around. Kenny believed that these people
[18:33] were looking for clues from his life because they couldn't
[18:36] figure out the next direction the character should take.
[18:40] Sometimes he described it as the founder of Domino's himself
[18:43] doing the snooping, while other times it was his agents.
[18:47] Perhaps most bizarrely, he confided to his family members
[18:51] that he had suspicions that it was the Noid itself rooting
[18:55] through his apartment. And no, you don't have to rewind
[18:59] there. Ken's mind state was so
[19:02] fractured at the time that he literally believed the founder
[19:05] of the pizza chain was sending a cartoon character to investigate
[19:08] him. I had to check the timeline on
[19:11] this, but this was just a year after Who Framed Roger Rabbit
[19:15] was a massive success. I have to wonder if some of
[19:19] Ken's mental framework could be explained by him misinterpreting
[19:22] the movie for a realistic depiction of real life while he
[19:25] was in a delusional state. A relative would say afterward
[19:30] that the family knew the campaign bothered him, but
[19:33] nobody imagined it would ever come to anything like what it
[19:36] did in his mind. This wasn't A1 sided obsession
[19:40] at all. It was a feud playing out in
[19:43] front of America and he was convinced he was losing it.
[19:47] On the morning of January 30th, 1989, he decided to even the
[19:52] score in a way that could only make sense under a delusional
[19:55] framework. It was around midday when
[19:59] Kenneth walked up to a Domino's in Chamblee, a suburb northeast
[20:03] of Atlanta, carrying a Magnum. He'd timed it, knowingly or not,
[20:08] for the slow stretch before the dinner rush, when the store was
[20:11] nearly empty and there was no crowd to get in the way.
[20:15] He was a tall man, well over 6 feet, and the employee who had
[20:20] opened the shop that day later recalled how fast the situation
[20:24] tipped from confusing to deadly. Kenny explained calmly enough at
[20:29] first that Domino's owed him money for the Noid and that he
[20:33] wanted the founder on the phone, so the employee did the only
[20:37] thing he could think of at the time.
[20:39] He dialed the one corporate number he was sure somebody
[20:42] would actually answer a safety hotline, and tried to convince
[20:47] the woman who picked up that this was really happening.
[20:50] Unfortunately, the woman on the other end thought it was a
[20:53] prank, perhaps something being recorded for a weird marketing
[20:57] stunt. The whole marketing campaign
[20:59] revolved around the Noid doing bizarre and inexplicable things,
[21:04] so getting a reaction out of corporate wasn't entirely out of
[21:07] line. Then Kenneth pulled the trigger
[21:10] and put a couple of rounds into the ceiling, and her tone
[21:13] changed in an instant. He shouted loud enough to be
[21:16] heard down the line that he'd harm the employees if police
[21:19] showed up. Then he hung up the phone, and
[21:23] every line in the restaurant started ringing at once.
[21:28] What followed stretched across the entire afternoon as the
[21:31] police laid siege to the normally peaceful pizza parlor.
[21:35] When officers did arrive, Kenneth fired several more
[21:38] warning shots into the ceiling, but the police didn't fire back
[21:43] on the phone. A negotiator tried to talk him
[21:46] into letting the two employees go, and Kenneth swung between
[21:50] sounding perfectly reasonable and making no sense at all.
[21:54] One moment he was bargaining like a man who thought it
[21:57] through and wanted the campaign ended.
[21:59] The next he was talking about large sums of cash, wanting a
[22:03] private plane to fly him to Mexico, or just wanting to go
[22:07] home. It became clear to the cops who
[22:10] were negotiating with him that this wasn't your usual hostage
[22:13] situation. To the officers trying to read
[22:17] him, he was close to impossible to predict, Friendly one minute
[22:21] and menacing the next, and there was no telling which version of
[22:24] him would pick up the phone. His demands had a logic that
[22:28] only worked inside his own head, and they were constantly
[22:32] changing. He wanted $100,000 as
[22:36] compensation for his likeness being used for the Noid, and he
[22:40] acted as if he was really bargaining with corporate about
[22:42] this. Other times, he wanted a white
[22:45] limousine to drive away to a waiting jet, or perhaps to just
[22:49] drive him home, depending on the moment.
[22:52] Sometimes he wanted the employees to call the company's
[22:55] headquarters up in Ann Arbor, MI, and make them stop the Noid
[22:59] campaign. And then there was the book.
[23:03] At one point, Kenneth offered to release one of the hostages in
[23:07] exchange for a copy of a science fiction novel called The Widow's
[23:10] Son. It's a wildly obscure request,
[23:14] the kind of detail you couldn't invent.
[23:17] The novel was part of a cult series built around secret
[23:20] societies threaded through history, a strange thing for a
[23:24] man in his state to fixate on mid standoff.
[23:27] But when an officer actually tracked down a copy and brought
[23:30] it to the store, Noyd reconsidered and said that the
[23:34] exchange was called off. Why he requested this specific
[23:38] book remains a mystery, though if I had to speculate, I would
[23:42] guess that he believed he was somehow a key player in world
[23:45] affairs. Back in Michigan, the company's
[23:50] executives were coming apart. There wasn't much that anyone
[23:53] hundreds of miles away could do except wait for the next phone
[23:57] update and hope the two young workers made it home.
[24:01] Inside the store, the pizza maker who initially talked to
[24:04] Ken tried a different tactic. He decided the smart move was to
[24:08] keep Kenneth calm, even sympathetic.
[24:12] So he talked to him like a person instead of a captor.
[24:16] At some point, Kenneth got hungry and asked for a loaded
[24:19] pizza, Four kinds of meat with a pile of vegetables and extra
[24:23] cheese. The employee made it, but
[24:26] Kenneth was paranoid enough that he wouldn't let the man come
[24:29] near it with a pizza cutter, apparently afraid the blade
[24:32] might end up turned on him. Well, I suppose that may not
[24:36] have been paranoid in the circumstances, since you
[24:39] probably don't want to mess with someone in fight or flight mode.
[24:44] The break came the way these things sometimes do, through an
[24:48] ordinary moment that turned into a window late in the afternoon.
[24:53] Kenneth agreed to let a single officer come inside to talk to
[24:56] him face to face. He needed somebody to open the
[24:59] door, and he chose the pizza maker to do it.
[25:03] For a few seconds, the young man stood there, close enough that
[25:07] Kenneth could easily have cut him down, and made his decision.
[25:11] He grabbed the handle, shoved the door open, and ran away as
[25:15] fast as he could. Before Ken could react, the
[25:19] second employee saw the opening and took it too, slipping out
[25:23] while Kenneth's attention was turned.
[25:26] Both of them made it, and around 5:00 that evening, with his
[25:29] hostages gone and his options spent, Kenneth Noyd gave himself
[25:34] up. No one had been hurt in the
[25:36] ordeal, at least not physically, a fact that would be of great
[25:41] assistance to Noyd going forward.
[25:44] Kenneth was charged with kidnapping, aggravated assault,
[25:47] and extortion, and on paper it looked like a slam dunk.
[25:51] The question was never really what he'd done, since there were
[25:55] two witnesses who had been there from the beginning, and an
[25:58] entire team of cops too. The answer was the thing his
[26:03] family had been gesturing at all along that Ken was a sick man,
[26:08] not an evil man. He was diagnosed with paranoid
[26:11] schizophrenia, and a judge ultimately found him not guilty
[26:15] by reason of insanity. The verdict didn't mean he
[26:18] simply walked free. It meant the court accepted that
[26:22] in the moment he was committing the crimes, he genuinely
[26:26] couldn't understand reality. Instead of prison, he was sent
[26:31] into lockdown psychiatric custody, where he spent months
[26:35] in treatment for the illness that had convinced him a clay
[26:38] cartoon was a living enemy. Sadly, though, the delusion
[26:43] never loosened its grip on Ken. Even after the standoff, the
[26:47] charges, and the diagnosis, Kenneth couldn't shake the
[26:52] belief that Domino's had built the Noid to mock him.
[26:55] He was eventually released from psychiatric custody, and
[26:59] unfortunately, this wasn't to be his second chance at a normal
[27:03] life. In 1995, some six years after
[27:07] the afternoon that briefly made him national news, he closed the
[27:11] curtains on himself at his home in Tallahassee, FL.
[27:16] For Domino's, the timing of all this was a nightmare, because
[27:20] the standoff happened while the Noid was at the absolute peak of
[27:24] his fame. The headlines almost wrote
[27:27] themselves, and the papers couldn't resist the obvious line
[27:31] that this time the hostages hadn't managed to avoid the
[27:34] Noid. The company kept using the
[27:37] character for a while afterward, but within a few years, as the
[27:42] 80s novelty wore thin and the 30 minute guarantee itself ran into
[27:46] trouble, the man in the red suit quietly disappeared from the
[27:50] marketing. The company has always insisted
[27:53] the hostage situation had nothing to do with that
[27:56] decision, and maybe that's the honest truth.
[28:00] Personally, though, I suspect that this was the reason the
[28:03] character was ultimately pulled from circulation.
[28:06] But admitting it could simply create copycats.
[28:10] Domino's, by insisting that the hostage incident had nothing to
[28:14] do with the pulling of the character, disincentivized
[28:17] others from acting in the same way.
[28:20] Of course, for Kenneth, I don't believe that would have made
[28:23] much of a difference at all, because he wasn't working within
[28:26] a rational framework when he committed the crime.
[28:32] Hey friends, it's Jimmy here, with my usual reminder to hit
[28:35] the notification bell and turn on all those notifications.
[28:40] Also, don't forget to suggest topics in the comments, anything
[28:44] from true crime cases to bizarre unsolved mysteries you'd like to
[28:47] see covered. I've got a long list of topics
[28:50] to cover, but Even so, I wouldn't mind adding a few more
[28:54] to the list. At around 2:00 in the morning on
[29:00] Monday the 11th of June 1951, someone leaned A collapsible
[29:06] ladder against the wall of the National Maritime Museum in
[29:09] Greenwich. The window he was aiming for sat
[29:12] about 11 feet above the ground, well inside the line of steel
[29:16] grills meant to protect the Nelson Galleries.
[29:19] He went up, slipped through, climbed down into the gallery on
[29:23] the same ladder, and helped himself to the most treasured
[29:27] object in the building. Then he went back out the way
[29:30] he'd come, and by the time anyone realized what had
[29:33] happened, he was gone. The alarm went up immediately.
[29:38] Scotland Yard was called, and the police were on the premises
[29:42] within 4 minutes. But they were still too late.
[29:45] What he took wasn't a painting or a chest of gold.
[29:49] It was a spray of diamonds, about 7 inches by 4, shaped like
[29:53] a starburst. It carried a story that
[29:56] stretched back more than a century and a half to one of the
[29:59] most famous sea battles in British history.
[30:03] We have to go back in time to fully understand what happened
[30:07] all the way to the summer of 1798.
[30:10] Napoleon Bonaparte had landed an army in Egypt, which was
[30:14] nominally Ottoman territory, and the Sultan in Constantinople
[30:18] wasn't pleased about it. On the 1st and 2nd of August, a
[30:24] British fleet under A1 armed Rear Admiral named Horatio
[30:27] Nelson found the French fleet anchored in Abukir Bay, near the
[30:32] mouth of the Nile. Admiral Nelson's actions
[30:35] effectively annihilated the French fleet, striking a major
[30:39] blow to the French position in the Mediterranean and beyond.
[30:43] Nelson himself had been wounded in the head during the action
[30:46] that day, Briefly convinced the Deep Gash would at the very
[30:50] least end his naval career. The French flagship, a giant
[30:54] called Lorien, caught fire and blew apart in an explosion so
[30:58] violent that the fighting reportedly paused while both
[31:02] sides watched. Hundreds of French sailors
[31:05] perished when she went up and their commanding Admiral had
[31:08] already fallen earlier in the fighting.
[31:11] Napoleon's army was left stranded in Egypt with no way
[31:14] home. It was a catastrophe for France
[31:17] and a gift to the Ottoman Empire.
[31:19] Sultan Saleem the Third wanted to thank the man responsible and
[31:23] he didn't do things by half measures.
[31:26] So he had his royal Jewelers create something to commemorate
[31:29] Nelson's victory. He awarded Nelson a Chilenk, an
[31:34] Ottoman military honor that had begun life centuries earlier as
[31:38] a simple feather pinned to a turban to mark a warrior's
[31:41] bravery. By the late 18th century, it had
[31:44] become a jeweled ornament, and Nelson's was the first ever
[31:48] given to someone who wasn't Ottoman.
[31:51] A normal Chelenk had seven rays, but Nelson's was made with 13,
[31:55] one for each enemy ship his fleet had taken, burnt or sunk
[32:00] at the Nile. A letter written at the time,
[32:03] later printed in a naval journal, described it about as
[32:07] well as anyone could. The writer said it looked like a
[32:10] hand with 13 diamond fingers reaching out.
[32:14] At its center sat a large diamond ringed by four more,
[32:18] each of those 5 worth perhaps 1000 lbs on its own, with around
[32:23] 300 smaller stones set around them.
[32:26] Here's the detail that turned a brooch into a marvel.
[32:30] The central star was mounted on a tiny clockwork mechanism so
[32:34] that when Nelson wore it, it rotated and flashed in the
[32:38] light. The whole thing, along with an
[32:41] Ottoman robe of honor, was handed to him at Naples in
[32:45] December 1798. Nelson wore it on his hat like a
[32:51] turban jewel, but worn in the British style, and people lost
[32:54] their minds over it. It set off a fashion craze in
[32:57] England for similar ornaments, and it became so closely tied to
[33:01] him that artist kept painting it onto his hat in portrait after
[33:05] portrait, long after the fact. They called it the Plume of
[33:10] Triumph, and for a man who was never shy about glory, it was
[33:14] the perfect accessory. And yes, if you ever wondered
[33:18] what that bizarre ornament was on Admiral Nelson's hat, now you
[33:23] know it was a Turkish honor. After Nelson fell at Trafalgar
[33:27] in Eighteen O 5, the Chelenk passed to his family, who held
[33:31] it for generations, and it was even worn at the court of Queen
[33:34] Victoria. Then in 1895, it was sold at
[33:40] auction and it drifted through private hands until 1929 when a
[33:45] public appeal was raised to keep it in the country.
[33:50] It was given to the nation in memory of Sir Colville Barclay,
[33:54] a recently deceased British ambassador to Portugal.
[33:58] When the National Maritime Museum opened its doors at
[34:00] Greenwich in 1937, the Chelenk went on display as one of its
[34:05] star exhibits. There it sat for the next 14
[34:09] years, glittering behind glass, until the man with the ladder
[34:13] arrived. The theft caused enough of an
[34:17] uproar that it was raised in the House of Lords, and the First
[34:20] Lord of the Admiralty stood up and laid out what was known.
[34:24] The jewel had been taken in a carefully planned smash and
[34:27] grab, and it appeared to be the only target of the robbery.
[34:32] The reward offered for its return was a modest 250 lbs,
[34:37] which as it turned out, wasn't that unreasonable given how the
[34:42] diamonds had declined in value. As precious as the Chelenk was
[34:47] to the nation, the diamonds themselves weren't actually
[34:50] worth a fortune. They were rose cut stones, not
[34:54] the finest quality, and by modern standards they weren't
[34:58] especially well cut. While these diamonds were worth
[35:02] a fortune back in Nelson's time, that was clearly no longer the
[35:06] case by the 1950s. It's worth was sentimental,
[35:10] historical, and essentially priceless in the way that only
[35:14] an irreplaceable thing can be, while being worth comparatively
[35:18] little to a fence. After all, this was one of the
[35:22] most distinctive pieces of jewelry imaginable, and it was
[35:26] simply too hot to resell without breaking the piece apart.
[35:31] There was a sharp observation in the debate in the House of
[35:34] Lords. More than one peer pointed out
[35:36] that this wasn't the first national relic to vanish
[35:39] recently. Treasures belonging to the Duke
[35:42] of Wellington had gone missing from another museum not long
[35:45] before. One of the Lords wondered aloud
[35:48] whether somebody had started specializing in stealing relics
[35:51] of national importance to Britain.
[35:54] The man on the ladder was almost certainly George Chatham, a
[35:58] Fulham born burglar known across London's underworld as taters.
[36:04] This was a nickname borrowed from Cockney slang for cold, for
[36:08] how calm he stayed on a job no matter what the pressure was.
[36:12] Chatham had once dreamed of being a footballer, and even had
[36:15] a trial for a professional team. But by the 1930s he'd settled
[36:21] into a far more lucrative trade, picking his victims out of
[36:25] society magazines and slipping through the London smog.
[36:29] And he had history with exactly this kind of target.
[36:33] In 1948, he'd allegedly climbed a pair of ladders lashed
[36:37] together to reach a window 40 feet up at the Victoria and
[36:40] Albert Museum. He made off with two jeweled
[36:44] ceremonial swords that had belonged to the Duke of
[36:47] Wellington. They were never recovered, and
[36:51] he was never charged. But chatter in the underworld
[36:54] was clear that it was he who had done it.
[36:58] So when that Lord wondered aloud about a connoisseur of stolen
[37:02] relics, he was unknowingly describing a real man.
[37:06] And that man had simply moved on from Wellington to Nelson.
[37:11] What happened to the Chelenk afterwards is the saddest part
[37:13] of this heist. Usually when I cover unsolved
[37:16] mysteries surrounding these sorts of heists, there's a good
[37:19] assumption that the item is still around somewhere out
[37:22] there. That likely isn't the case here,
[37:25] and the Chelenk is unlikely to ever be recovered due to a
[37:28] little biographical fact about the thief himself.
[37:32] Chatham was a compulsive gambler who fed most of his loot
[37:35] straight into the rigged casino tables of London's gangsters.
[37:39] By the time he died penniless in 1997, he'd reportedly stolen
[37:44] close to £100 million worth of goods over his career.
[37:49] If that number seems absolutely insane, it is.
[37:53] But it makes more sense when you realize he spent over 60 years
[37:56] as a professional thief targeting high society
[37:59] individuals. In a feat that would be
[38:02] impressive if he wasn't a criminal, he was still
[38:04] performing acts of cat burglary into his 80s.
[38:09] By his own later account, he sold Nelson's Jewel for the
[38:12] modern equivalent of a few 1000 lbs to a criminal gang who he
[38:17] believed broke it apart into individual stones.
[38:21] To put that in some perspective, he essentially destroyed a
[38:25] priceless piece of history for the equivalent of $5000.
[38:30] Those rose diamonds, never the best to begin with, would have
[38:33] been scattered and reset, untraceable within weeks.
[38:37] They may also have been re cut, which would have made the
[38:40] identification of the stolen goods even more difficult.
[38:44] The shellink that had survived the death of a national hero and
[38:48] 150 years of history was very probably destroyed within days
[38:53] of being stolen to settle a gambling debt.
[38:58] It's never been seen again and if I had to take an educated
[39:01] guess, it never will be. A priceless piece of national
[39:05] heritage lost forever.

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