# Four Cases So Disturbing… Netflix Won't Cover Them | 218

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 30 Apr 2026, 42 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO2302811492.mp3

Join me for 4 chilling cases that are too disturbing for Netflix. Episode 218 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, Peter Ivers, Devin Williams, Peter Ivars, music mysteries, cold cases, Agatha Christie, Jane Doe

## Transcript

[0:00] On the morning of March 3rd, 1983, after a series of
[0:04] unanswered phone calls, a neighbor was sent up to check on
[0:07] Peter Ivers at his downtown Los Angeles loft.
[0:11] Inside, the neighbor found him on his bed, half covered with
[0:15] his head, badly battered. Within hours, what should have
[0:20] been a sealed crime scene became something closer to awake
[0:25] Friends and acquaintances heard the news, came over and walked
[0:29] through the rooms before the police could secure anything.
[0:33] Possessions were touched, moved and taken, and by later
[0:37] accounts, at least one person close to Ivar's left the loft
[0:41] carrying bedding that should have been collected as evidence.
[0:45] The man inside that loft was a Harvard graduate, a musician who
[0:49] worked with David Lynch, and the strangely brilliant ringmaster
[0:53] of America's first punk television show.
[0:57] More than 40 years later, his case is still open, and no one
[1:01] has ever been charged. Peter Ivers was born in 1946 and
[1:07] grew up largely in the Boston suburb of Brookline.
[1:11] His father passed when he was young, and his mother, Merle,
[1:14] raised him on her own, encouraging the academic and
[1:17] musical streak that came to define his life.
[1:21] By the time he reached Harvard in the mid 60s, he'd already
[1:24] turned himself into a remarkable harmonica player, the kind of
[1:29] musician other musicians stopped to listen to.
[1:32] He studied classical languages, won numerous student honors, and
[1:37] eventually became part of a circle that would cede Hollywood
[1:40] for the next two decades. Ivar's college roommates and
[1:45] close friends included people who'd go on to write for
[1:48] National Lampoon, run major studios, produce Animal House,
[1:53] and shape American comedy. But Ivars didn't follow his
[1:58] friends straight into the studio system, and he chased the
[2:01] musical dream instead. Through the 70s, he released a
[2:06] handful of strange and deeply uncommercial albums that earned
[2:10] cult devotion but not much money.
[2:14] He worked his harmonica into film soundtracks, creating a
[2:17] unique sound that was entirely his, famously working on David
[2:21] Lynch's legendary film Eraserhead.
[2:26] By the early 80s, Ivar's was living in Los Angeles, hosting a
[2:30] punk and new wave music show that ran on cable and made him,
[2:34] in certain circles, a minor celebrity.
[2:37] The show was called New Wave Theater, and it did something
[2:41] almost no one else was doing. In 1981, it put hardcore punk
[2:45] bands in front of a camera and treated them as serious artists.
[2:50] Peter Ivers introduced them in absurd costumes and delivered
[2:53] half philosophical, half St. Preacher rants straight to
[2:56] camera. He hosted in metallic jumpsuits
[3:00] and patterned jackets, and he spoke in non sequiturs.
[3:03] And trust me, these are available online, and his
[3:06] performance is truly a sight to behold.
[3:09] He was an Ivy League man playing a part, and the bands he
[3:13] interviewed mostly seemed amused by him, occasionally hostile,
[3:17] sometimes openly confused. He wasn't a peer of theirs, but
[3:22] something stranger and more interesting, a serious
[3:26] experimental musician who actually wanted to know what
[3:29] these new punk bands thought. By the early months of 1983, he
[3:35] had a producer's role on new wave theater projects and
[3:38] development and an album in the works.
[3:42] There were meetings to take, and there was a future to walk
[3:44] toward. He was 36 years old, and from
[3:48] the outside, the next decade of his career looked enormous.
[3:53] The loft divers kept on the eastern edge of downtown Los
[3:57] Angeles was basically exactly what you'd expect for an
[4:00] unconventional guy like this. It was in a gritty stretch of
[4:04] warehouse blocks in the Arts District, close to Skid Row, and
[4:08] it functioned as something close to an open house.
[4:11] Musicians crashed there, and acquaintances drifted through at
[4:14] all hours. Homeless people from the
[4:17] surrounding streets were sometimes welcomed inside, and
[4:21] Ivar's had a reputation for generosity that bordered on
[4:25] naive. He was known to feed people,
[4:28] hand them cash, and let complete strangers sleep on anything from
[4:32] a couch to an empty space on the floor.
[4:35] When calls to him went unanswered that morning, a
[4:39] neighbor was asked to look into the situation, and the neighbor
[4:42] walked into a scene that didn't immediately make sense.
[4:46] Ivars was on the bed in the upstairs sleeping area, his head
[4:50] badly damaged. According to later
[4:53] investigators, the weapon was almost certainly a hammer, and a
[4:57] wooden handled 1 was reportedly found at the loft.
[5:01] In a truly cowardly act, he'd been struck repeatedly while he
[5:05] was likely asleep. Given the fact that there was no
[5:08] signs to indicate he took any defensive measures, there was no
[5:14] sign of forced entry and whoever did this either had a key, was
[5:19] let in earlier, or perhaps just walked through an unlocked door
[5:22] at some point in the night. What happened in the hours after
[5:26] the body was discovered is now the stuff of true crime infamy.
[5:32] Word spread fast through the arts community, and people who
[5:36] knew Ivar's came to the loft and walked through it before the
[5:38] police could secure the rooms. Some have admitted in later
[5:43] interviews that they took small items as mementos, partly out of
[5:47] grief and partly out of a fear that things might otherwise be
[5:51] lost to an evidence locker. Bedding, including bedding that
[5:55] almost certainly carried physical evidence, reportedly
[5:58] left the scene with someone close to him.
[6:01] The removal of the bedding is the thing that I perhaps find
[6:04] the most disturbing, since it's hard to think of any innocent
[6:08] reason why anyone would take that or would want it for a case
[6:13] that desperately needed clean forensics.
[6:16] This whole situation was a disaster from which the
[6:18] investigation never recovered, and some have questioned whether
[6:22] that was intentional. The contaminated scene meant
[6:26] that physical evidence was unreliable from the start.
[6:30] Witnesses giving formal statements had been inside the
[6:33] loft after the body's discovery, sometimes for long stretches.
[6:38] Trace evidence belonged to dozens of people who had no real
[6:42] business being there, and separating the meaningful from
[6:45] the meaningless became almost impossible.
[6:49] The earliest theory, and the one favored by some who knew Ivar's
[6:53] personally, was that he'd been attacked by a transient he'd let
[6:57] into the loft. The neighborhood was rough, the
[7:00] door had been unlocked, and due to the handling of the scene, no
[7:04] one could say if a robbery had actually occurred.
[7:08] His habit of taking strangers in had alarmed some of his friends
[7:12] for years, especially considering that there was no
[7:15] apparent vetting process whatsoever.
[7:18] There were people from the surrounding blocks who fit the
[7:21] profile of someone capable of violence over a little bit of
[7:24] cash. None of them, however, was ever
[7:27] pinned to the scene by physical evidence that would hold up in
[7:30] court. A second line of thinking
[7:33] pointed to someone in Ivar's professional or social circle.
[7:38] Investigators looked into business disputes, romantic
[7:41] entanglements and the volatile underground music scene that
[7:45] surrounded New Wave theater. There were rumors of conflicts
[7:49] over money, over the show's direction, over a producer or
[7:53] band member he'd crossed. But most of these leads went
[7:57] cold quickly. The musicians who'd appeared on
[8:00] the show were interviewed, as was the production crew.
[8:04] Old friends from Harvard, some flying in from across the
[8:08] country, were interviewed on the belief that someone may have put
[8:12] out a hit on Ivar's. However, nothing held together
[8:16] long enough to take to a grand jury, and in the end no suspects
[8:20] were formally named and the case went cold.
[8:24] The fundamental problem with the Ivar's case has always been the
[8:27] first hours, and unless someone comes forward, it will clearly
[8:31] never be solved. Investigations rise or fall on
[8:35] what's collected and observed before the scene changes, and
[8:39] almost everything that could go wrong in those opening hours
[8:42] did. The amount of contamination at
[8:45] the scene meant that the potential to actually close out
[8:48] the case was already fairly minimal to begin with.
[8:52] It's entirely possible that one of the people who contaminated
[8:55] the scene in the hours before detectives arrived was actually
[8:59] the perpetrator who came there simply to cause chaos.
[9:03] The idea that someone took the betting as well also seems to
[9:06] suggest that at least one of the people who showed up wasn't just
[9:10] looking for a memento of their friend.
[9:16] A grown man, a trucker by trade, stands alone and barefoot on a
[9:21] Forest Service Rd. in the high country of central Arizona,
[9:24] holding a $20 bill in one hand and a rock in the other.
[9:28] He's hitting the bill with the rock as if he's trying to spark
[9:31] it into flame, and when the campers stop and ask if he needs
[9:35] help, he tells them calmly that he has to light the grill.
[9:40] Then he throws the rock at their car.
[9:42] Two years later, in the quiet of late spring, a skull turns up on
[9:47] the rim 1/4 mile away. And that's pretty much all
[9:51] anyone has ever really known for sure.
[9:55] Devin Williams was 29 years old in the spring of 1995, a long
[10:00] haul trucker who lived in the small town of Americas, Kansas
[10:03] with his wife Mary Lou and their three kids.
[10:07] He drove for Flint Hill Transportation, an Emporia based
[10:10] outfit that ran rigs across most of the western half of the
[10:14] country. By every account from people who
[10:16] knew him, Devin was a steady guy.
[10:20] He didn't have a history of mental illness and he passed
[10:23] every drug screening his employer ever asked him to take.
[10:27] He liked the job, he liked getting home, and he was good at
[10:31] the long hours that come with hauling freight 1000 miles at a
[10:34] stretch. Nothing in the record paints him
[10:37] as anything other than a working father trying to put in his
[10:40] miles and clock back in at the kitchen table.
[10:44] On May 23rd of that year, Devon pulled out of Kansas, heading
[10:47] West on a route he'd run plenty of times before.
[10:51] He delivered his load on schedule somewhere in
[10:53] California, then turned around and picked up a refrigerated
[10:57] trailer of lettuce and strawberries bound for Kansas
[11:00] City. On paper, he should have been
[11:02] home by Monday morning, but he never made it.
[11:06] What happened in the four or five days between that
[11:08] California pickup and the moment 2 campers found him crouched in
[11:12] the dirt is one of the strangest cases in American trucking.
[11:18] The last anyone at the company heard from Devin was a Saturday
[11:21] night call from a pay phone in Kingman, AZ.
[11:24] That was May 27th. From the dispatcher's account.
[11:29] It was a short, frustrated conversation, and he told them
[11:33] he hadn't been able to get any sleep.
[11:35] He said he was going to push on anyway, try to get back on the
[11:38] road and make his delivery window in Kansas City.
[11:43] Kingman sits right on Interstate 40, which is the obvious route
[11:47] home for a driver coming out of California with cargo bound for
[11:51] the Midwest. From there, the sensible move is
[11:55] to keep rolling east on the Interstate, blow past Flagstaff,
[12:00] and eventually hook N toward Kansas.
[12:03] And that's the route he'd driven before.
[12:06] It's the route his boss has expected him to drive too.
[12:09] But it's not the route he drove. Sometime after hanging up that
[12:13] phone, Devin pointed his ten ton rig South and he left the
[12:17] highway. He drove his rig into country.
[12:20] A 48 foot tractor trailer has no business being in, quite
[12:23] literally, since there was absolutely no reason for him to
[12:27] be there by Memorial Day, Sunday, the morning of May 28th,
[12:32] Devon was deep inside the Tonto National Forest, hours off his
[12:37] planned route and miles from any road meant for an 18 Wheeler.
[12:41] The Forest Service roads in that part of central AZ are narrow,
[12:46] gravel and often built for nothing heavier than a pickup
[12:48] truck. A loaded 48 foot trailer is a
[12:52] hilarious thing to imagine in there, since it's so completely
[12:55] defies expectations. But it's also a terrifying thing
[12:59] to encounter in person, which is what kept happening.
[13:03] And through that day and into the next.
[13:06] Campers in the area reported the same surreal sight.
[13:10] There was a massive truck rolling at speed back and forth
[13:14] along the same stretches of dirt, with a driver who didn't
[13:17] seem to register that other people existed.
[13:20] One group of campers later told investigators the rig came at
[13:24] them head on fast, and they only just managed to swerve out of
[13:28] the way by going partly off the road.
[13:32] And if you've ever been on any roads like this, you know that
[13:35] I'm not exaggerating when I say these are extremely narrow.
[13:39] Those campers got a good look at the man behind the wheel, and
[13:43] what they saw was strange, to say the least.
[13:46] The trucker was staring straight ahead, expressionless, as if he
[13:51] were somewhere else entirely, lost in his own dimension on
[13:55] some sort of mission through the woods.
[13:58] This went on for the better part of a day, with numerous reports
[14:02] flooding in. The truck eventually came to
[14:04] rest in a clearing along Forest Service Road 321 near the
[14:09] Mogolon Rim. When the rig finally stopped,
[14:13] Devin climbed out, took off his shoes, and from there his
[14:17] behavior somehow got harder to rationally explain.
[14:22] The next morning, on the 29th, 2 campers named Jack and Lynn
[14:26] Harrington were exploring along that same stretch of Rd. when
[14:30] they came across Devon sitting in the dirt by a tree.
[14:33] He was barefoot, and he was talking, but it wasn't to them
[14:38] and it wasn't to anyone visible. He was holding a $20 bill in one
[14:42] hand and a rock in the other, and he kept striking the bill
[14:46] with the rock as if he were trying to start a fire with it.
[14:50] When the Yarringtons stopped and asked whether he was all right,
[14:54] he answered them in a calm, matter of fact way, telling them
[14:58] he needed to light the grill. Then, completely out of
[15:01] character for this mild mannered trucker, he turned and threw the
[15:05] rock at their car. The Yarringtons did the sensible
[15:09] thing and got out of there, and they drove until they reached a
[15:12] phone to call for help. By the time anyone made it back
[15:15] to that stretch of forest, Devin Williams was gone.
[15:20] The truck was still there, abandoned in the clearing, and
[15:24] his shoes, which appeared to have been his only pair, were
[15:28] also left behind. The man himself had walked off
[15:32] into a few 100 square miles of Backcountry wearing no footwear,
[15:36] apparently with no awareness that he was doing it.
[15:40] Search and rescue teams worked the area for days trying to find
[15:43] any track of Devon. Tracking dogs, ground searchers
[15:48] and the occasional helicopter combed the forest around the
[15:51] abandoned rig, but they turned up nothing.
[15:55] No body was ever recovered and no footprints LED anywhere
[15:59] meaningful enough to follow. And in the blink of an eye, two
[16:04] years had passed. During that time, the case sat
[16:07] with Arizona authorities, mostly cold and completely unexplained.
[16:13] Then, on May 2nd of 1997, a pair of hikers working their way
[16:18] along the bottom of the Mogolon Rim spotted a skull.
[16:23] It was found in Gila County near the intersection of Forest
[16:26] Service Road 321 and Rim Road 300, roughly 1/4 of a mile from
[16:32] the spot where Devon had last been seen.
[16:35] Dental records would later confirmed it was him, though the
[16:39] rest of his remains were never recovered.
[16:41] The skull alone wasn't enough to give a medical examiner any
[16:45] sense of why he perished. Whatever had happened to the
[16:49] rest of his earthly remains is unknown, though given the area,
[16:53] it's suspected that the local wildlife may have taken the rest
[16:57] of him. Plenty of theories have been
[17:00] kicked around in the decades since, and none of them quite
[17:04] fit. The diabetic angle is one of the
[17:07] more popular, though personally I can't really figure out why
[17:12] other than the fact all records indicate Devon was quite
[17:15] overweight. A serious blood sugar crash can
[17:19] produce confusion, slurred speech, strange behavior,
[17:24] amongst other problems. The trouble is, there's no
[17:28] record of Devon being diabetic, and an episode that lasts more
[17:32] than a day and ends with a quarter mile walk off into the
[17:35] woods isn't really how those usually go.
[17:40] Carbon monoxide poisoning gets brought up too, on the theory
[17:44] that an exhaust leak in the cab could have slowly poisoned him
[17:46] as he drove. Carbon monoxide can absolutely
[17:50] scramble cognition and produce bizarre behavior, but again, the
[17:55] duration is the problem. Once a victim is out of the cab
[18:00] and breathing fresh air, they tend to recover, but Devin
[18:03] clearly didn't. There's also the tiny issue of
[18:07] the fact that while the rig was investigated, no evidence
[18:10] publicly released ever indicated any leak.
[18:15] In my view, sleep deprivation is a more honest contender for an
[18:18] explanation here. At least if he didn't meet with
[18:21] foul play, though I'll get to that shortly.
[18:24] He told dispatch on that last call that he hadn't slept, and
[18:28] severe sustained sleep loss can produce what's clinically
[18:32] described as a brief psychotic state.
[18:35] There's also the possibility that Devin was working under
[18:37] some pretty unmanageable deadlines and that he resorted
[18:41] to what I'll euphemistically call big rig rocket fuel.
[18:46] I've talked to some long haul truckers about this, old timers,
[18:50] and they say that taking stimulants was quite common in
[18:53] the 90s when regulations around driving times were looser.
[18:58] That said, we know that he was previously tested for substances
[19:02] and everything came back clean, which appears to make this less
[19:06] likely, but not necessarily. It might be the case that he was
[19:11] on a particularly tight deadline and acquired stimulants at a
[19:15] truck stop or elsewhere. He may have been unfamiliar with
[19:19] dosing and been unable to sleep. Or perhaps he kept taking more
[19:23] after he had already started slipping into a delusional
[19:26] framework. There's also the possibility of
[19:29] a sudden mental health crisis with no prior warning, the kind
[19:33] of acute event that can occasionally hit people who've
[19:36] never had a symptom in their lives.
[19:38] However, looking into it, it seems like he was past the age
[19:42] where these first episodes tend to arise, so that makes this
[19:46] slightly less likely. There's also the possibility
[19:50] that Devin met with foul play, and for some reason this appears
[19:54] to have been largely written off by investigators.
[19:57] I was also able to find court records from a worker's
[20:00] compensation tribunal that indicates that the family
[20:03] believes this as well, but couldn't prove it on a balance
[20:06] of probabilities. Given the evidence we have, and
[20:10] making a few inferences based upon it, I don't think this is
[20:14] actually that unlikely. The major data points I'm
[20:17] drawing on for this theory are the encounter with the
[20:20] Yarringtons, as well as, to a lesser extent, his reckless
[20:24] driving on the narrow roads. In terms of the latter point, we
[20:29] know that Devin was clearly acting with reckless disregard
[20:32] for those around him. We also know that when he
[20:36] encountered the Yeringtons, the couple were trying to be
[20:39] helpful, but he threw a rock at their vehicle.
[20:43] That's the sort of act that triggers a fight or flight
[20:46] response, and the couple chose the latter.
[20:50] We also know that the area where he was found has a decent amount
[20:53] of hunters, and the one thing all hunters have in common is
[20:58] that they're armed. If Devin approached a hunter in
[21:01] the Backcountry and started acting aggressively, it's a
[21:05] distinct possibility that the hunter may have chosen fight
[21:08] rather than flight and simply cut him down.
[21:12] The hunter may have then fled the scene and never reported
[21:15] what happened to the authorities, fearing
[21:17] prosecution. It's a speculative theory, of
[21:20] course, but it fits the evidence fairly well given what we know
[21:25] about Devon's actions that day. At present, barring any further
[21:29] evidence being uncovered, such as more remains which can give a
[21:33] clear sense of how he perished, the case has completely stalled
[21:37] out and remains cold. Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here
[21:44] with my usual reminder to hit the subscribe button and the
[21:47] notification bell. Also, remember to drop a comment
[21:51] saying what you're doing while you watch or listen to my video,
[21:54] or just leave a quick comment saying that you're doing your
[21:57] part. On a Gray October afternoon in
[22:03] 1980, a hiker pushing through the brush near the Iowa Hill
[22:07] Road bridge in California's Sierra foothills noticed
[22:11] something on the ground that didn't belong there.
[22:13] It was bone, and there was a lot of it.
[22:16] And by the time Placer County sheriff's deputies finished
[22:19] working through the field that day, they'd recovered the
[22:22] skeletal remains of a young woman.
[22:26] Colfax sits along the old transcontinental railroad route
[22:29] in Placer County, a former mining town about an hour's
[22:33] drive northeast of Sacramento off Interstate 80.
[22:37] From there, a narrow, twisting 2 lane called Iowa Hill Rd. peels
[22:40] off toward the historic gold camp of the same name.
[22:44] It drops into a deep Canyon, crosses the North Fork of the
[22:48] American River and claws its way back up the other side.
[22:52] According to some sources online, it's one of the more
[22:55] punishing drives in Northern California, full of blind curves
[22:59] and hairpin turns with nothing but air.
[23:01] On the downhill side, the bridge that spans the river sits in
[23:06] country that was carved up by hydraulic mining back in the
[23:09] 1850's. The Iowa Hill district once
[23:12] produced enormous quantities of gold, but by 1980 the area was
[23:17] isolated and very quiet. Fewer than 200 people lived in
[23:22] Iowa Hill proper, and some of them still ran their homes off
[23:25] generators well into the 21st century.
[23:28] It's the exact kind of place where someone could get rid of a
[23:31] body and expect it to stay lost for a long time.
[23:36] She was lying in a brush covered field roughly 4 miles east of
[23:40] Colfax, not far from the bridge. The remains were skeletal, which
[23:45] meant an autopsy could only narrow down so much.
[23:49] The pathologist estimated she'd been deceased at least several
[23:52] months and quite possibly more than a year, which pushed her
[23:56] likely time of death back into 1979.
[24:01] A cause of death couldn't be determined from what was left of
[24:04] her, but investigators treated the scene as a probable slaying
[24:09] from the start. Trash was scattered around the
[24:13] field, and it wasn't clear whether she died at that spot or
[24:16] been dumped there after the fact.
[24:19] A blanket was also recovered near the body, though it's link
[24:23] to her was never firmly established from the skeleton.
[24:27] Forensic examiner's put together a rough profile of who they
[24:30] believed she was in life. She was white, somewhere between
[24:35] 18 and 27 years old, and stood between 5 feet and five feet 5.
[24:41] Her hair was brown with reddish or blonde tones depending on
[24:45] which description you read. Her feet were strikingly small.
[24:50] The shoes found with her were a size 3 1/2, which by adult
[24:54] standards is unusual and worth remembering.
[24:58] Dental records were preserved and eventually uploaded to
[25:01] national databases, but no viable genetic profile was ever
[25:05] recovered from what remained. That said, it remains unclear to
[25:10] me if the authorities still have the evidence from her case
[25:13] somewhere in a locker. If they do, modern forensic
[25:17] scientists can perform some absolute wizardry to recover DNA
[25:22] from highly degraded samples. But more on that in a moment.
[25:28] The Jane Doe was also found with her clothing on, which gives
[25:31] some clues to who she was in life.
[25:34] She had on a pair of dark blue Levi's jeans, a small bluish
[25:38] halter top in a multi colored pattern, and blue Adidas tennis
[25:42] shoes with the classic white stripe along the side.
[25:47] None of it was unusual for a young woman in the late 1970s,
[25:51] and it's the kind of outfit you'd throw on for a summer
[25:54] evening or a road trip, or perhaps to go hitch hiking.
[25:58] She wasn't wearing any jewelry, and no purse or bag was found
[26:02] near the body. Nothing that could have
[26:05] identified her was ever recovered, though it remains
[26:08] unclear whether the perpetrator took the most obvious
[26:11] identifying information, such as what could have been in her
[26:14] wallet. Investigators worked the case
[26:17] the way you'd expect them to in 1980, and a number of potential
[26:21] matches have been ruled out. They pulled missing persons
[26:25] reports, compared dental impressions against the paper
[26:28] files available at the time, and chased whatever tips came in
[26:32] from the local area, but none of it went anywhere.
[26:36] Over the years, her case was added to the Doe Network and
[26:39] eventually entered into the National Missing and
[26:42] Unidentified Person System, where her case still sits today.
[26:47] Her dental records are on file in those databases, and for now,
[26:51] they remain the strongest forensic thread still available
[26:54] to anyone working the case. Detectives have speculated that
[26:58] she may have fallen victim to any number of serial predators
[27:02] who were active in California in the 1970s.
[27:06] However, based on the evidence thus far, and given the sheer
[27:09] number of them active at the time, who that might be remains
[27:13] sheer guesswork at best, and no suspect has been named.
[27:19] So the one thing I haven't been able to find out about this
[27:22] case, in which I hinted at earlier, is what happened to her
[27:25] remains. Usually in cases like this, the
[27:28] Doe is eventually buried, though unfortunately this often happens
[27:33] in an unmarked grave and record keeping can be shoddy.
[27:38] If her remains are still available or can be found and
[27:41] made available, the best chance of giving this Jane Doe her name
[27:46] back comes from genetic genealogy.
[27:50] If you're someone who lives in Placer County, the best thing
[27:53] you could do to help the case forward is to call or e-mail and
[27:57] ask for an update on the investigation.
[28:00] Cold cases like this tend to get forgotten when no one is
[28:03] specifically known to be looking for the Jane Doe, and when the
[28:06] case isn't high profile. A simple follow up e-mail on the
[28:11] investigation by a local could truly be the one thing that
[28:14] pushes this case forward and allows this woman to have her
[28:18] name restored to her. A Gray vehicle sits at the edge
[28:25] of a chalk pit in the Surrey countryside, headlights still
[28:28] burning into the December dark. Inside it, a fur coat, a packed
[28:34] suitcase and an expired driver's license.
[28:38] The driver is gone, and within 48 hours, more than 1000 police
[28:42] officers and 15,000 volunteers will be combing the woods for
[28:47] her body. The missing woman would one day
[28:51] be the most famous mystery writer in the entire world, and
[28:54] nobody, not even her, will ever explain what really happened
[28:59] next. By the autumn of 1926, Agatha
[29:03] Christie was 36 and hadn't quite hit the extreme heights of her
[29:07] career. But she was by no means obscure.
[29:11] She had finally broken out of the cozy little world of
[29:13] detective fiction and was receiving wider attention as a
[29:17] novelist. From the outside, she looked
[29:20] like a woman in full bloom, on the cusp of true greatness.
[29:24] But from the inside, she was crumbling.
[29:28] Her mother had passed in April after a long illness, and Agatha
[29:32] had spent months alone at the family home, Ashfield in Devon,
[29:37] sorting belongings, eating little, sleeping less.
[29:42] Her husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, a decorated aviator
[29:46] who'd settled into a comfortable civilian job, had grown
[29:50] emotionally distant by the late summer.
[29:53] He told her flat out that he'd fallen for a younger woman
[29:56] called Nancy Neil, and that he wanted a divorce.
[30:00] And you're going to want to keep the name Nancy Neil in mind
[30:02] going forward because it's going to be more significant to the
[30:06] case than you may think. Agatha didn't want a divorce,
[30:11] and for her part, she believed spending time together that fall
[30:14] could fix things. But this simply degenerated into
[30:18] frequent arguments. On Friday, December 3rd, 1926,
[30:23] an argument boiled over at lunchtime and it was clear the
[30:27] marriage was beyond saving. Archie packed a bag and left for
[30:31] the weekend to be with Nancy at a house party.
[30:34] He didn't tell his wife exactly where he was going, though she
[30:37] had a fair idea. That evening at around 9:45,
[30:42] Christie told the maid she was going for a drive, got into her
[30:46] Morris Cowley and drove off into the dark. 3 short letters did
[30:51] appear in the mail over the next day or so, one to Archie, one to
[30:56] his brother Campbell and one to her secretary Charlotte Fisher.
[31:01] The contents of the 1st 2 have never been confirmed because
[31:04] Archie destroyed them almost immediately.
[31:07] The note to Charlotte said something vague about heading to
[31:10] Yorkshire to rest and recover. The next morning, December 4th,
[31:15] a young man named Frederick Door spotted an abandoned car at a
[31:19] popular spot called Newlands Corner near Guildford.
[31:23] The Morris Cowley had rolled forward over the lip of a chalk
[31:26] pit and come to rest halfway down the slope.
[31:30] Its headlights were still on and inside, neatly arranged across
[31:34] the seats, were the fur coat, a small case with several changes
[31:38] of clothes, and Christie's expired license.
[31:43] What followed was one of the largest search operations in
[31:46] English history up to that point, and the Surrey Police
[31:49] pulled in officers from neighboring counties.
[31:52] By the second week, the Daily News was offering a £100 reward
[31:57] and roughly 15,000 volunteers were combing the area where she
[32:01] had disappeared. Sniffer dogs worked the woodland
[32:04] and aircraft flew low over the chalk hills.
[32:07] Dredging crews worked a deep stretch of water nearby called
[32:11] the Silent Pool, a place local legend already linked to a
[32:14] drowned medieval girl. The papers, of course, wouldn't
[32:18] let the story go, and speculation swung wildly.
[32:21] Some columnists were sure she'd been done in by Archie.
[32:25] Others were sure she'd ended things herself and that her body
[32:29] would eventually surface in the silent pool.
[32:33] A few dissident voices were already muttering that it was
[32:36] all a hoax to sell books and raise her profile as a mystery
[32:40] author. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by then
[32:44] deep into spiritualism, reportedly took one of
[32:47] Christie's gloves to a medium named Horace Leaf.
[32:51] He pronounced that she was alive and would be heard from on the
[32:55] following Wednesday. A popular mystery novelist even
[32:59] came to the location to observe the abandoned car, which some
[33:03] criticized as a crass attempt to raise her own profile.
[33:08] The home secretary, William Johnson Hicks, was fielding
[33:11] awkward questions in Parliament about why this woman hadn't been
[33:15] found yet. Archie spent most of those 11
[33:18] days under enormous, mostly unspoken suspicion, since he had
[33:23] a clear motive and a now inconvenient wife who didn't
[33:26] want a divorce. He'd initially lied to the
[33:29] police about exactly where he'd been on the Friday night, only
[33:33] admitting he'd been at a house party once detectives pressed
[33:36] him. Around this time, detectives
[33:39] drained a pond on the grounds near the couple's home looking
[33:42] for a body, which of course sent the media speculation into
[33:45] OverDrive. Archie more or less stopped
[33:49] going to work and stayed at home, trying to keep his
[33:52] daughter from understanding what the headlines were saying about
[33:54] her father. The Surrey Police found
[33:57] themselves chasing nearly every reported sighting personally and
[34:01] finding nothing. Unfortunately, a number of the
[34:05] tips that came in seemed to be from people who wanted to insert
[34:08] themselves into a high profile story, proving that human nature
[34:12] doesn't really change. The police Superintendent of
[34:16] Surrey, for his part, was very clear that he believed that
[34:19] Christie's body would be found somewhere around the abandoned
[34:22] car. He couldn't accept the
[34:25] possibility that she had simply gone missing, perhaps on her own
[34:28] accord. On the evening of December 14th,
[34:33] 11 days after the abandoned car had been discovered, something
[34:37] finally happened. Members of the resident band at
[34:40] the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire came to a
[34:44] quiet decision. They've been watching one of
[34:48] their long stay guests for several days and they thought
[34:51] her back story was a little suspicious.
[34:55] She was a slim, soft spoken woman in her 30s from Cape Town
[34:59] who checked in on December 4th, calling herself Misses Teresa
[35:03] Neal. She danced in the evenings, did
[35:06] the crossword, played pool in the lounge and read the
[35:10] newspaper coverage of the missing English novelist with
[35:14] apparent calm. The musicians compared the
[35:17] photograph in the papers with the woman across the room and
[35:20] decided they were the same person.
[35:23] They tipped off the police, who watched the hotel quietly for a
[35:27] day, sent for the family and waited.
[35:31] On the evening of the 14th, Archie travelled up by train,
[35:36] was shown into the lounge at dinner time and sat behind a
[35:40] newspaper watching his wife come down the stairs.
[35:44] According to staff who saw it, she behaved as though he were a
[35:47] vaguely familiar acquaintance rather than her husband of
[35:51] nearly 12 years. He said afterwards that she
[35:54] didn't seem to recognize him with any real certainty, though
[35:58] she eventually agreed to come home the following morning.
[36:02] Notably, the surname Christie had chosen for her alias Neil
[36:07] was the surname of her husband's mistress.
[36:10] She'd reportedly also placed a small advertisement in the Times
[36:15] asking any friends or relatives of Teresa Neal to please make
[36:19] contact through a post office box.
[36:22] Nobody answered because no such person existed.
[36:26] And this bizarre act has never been meaningfully explained,
[36:29] much like many other elements of this unsolved mystery.
[36:34] Christie was examined the following day by two doctors,
[36:37] both of whom announced she'd suffered a genuine episode of
[36:40] memory loss brought on by bereavement and prolonged
[36:43] stress. The term floating around in
[36:46] private was a fugue state, a dissociative condition in which
[36:50] a person can travel and function competently for days while
[36:54] having no continuous memory of who they are.
[36:57] Her sister accepted the diagnosis and Archie publicly
[37:01] accepted it as well, though whether he did in private is
[37:04] unknown. The press by and large did not,
[37:08] and the Daily Mail openly suggested it was a publicity
[37:11] stunt. A number of Surrey residents
[37:14] were furious about the cost of the search and wanted Agatha
[37:18] Christie to be forced to reimburse it.
[37:21] After being collected from Harrogate, Christie was taken to
[37:24] her sister's house near Manchester for several weeks of
[37:27] quiet recovery away from the press.
[37:30] Family accounts suggest she never really recovered A
[37:33] continuous memory of the 11 days at all, only vague, dreamlike
[37:38] fragments. Agatha never publicly discussed
[37:42] those 11 days again and wouldn't answer any questions about it
[37:46] further. Her own autobiography, finished
[37:50] shortly before her passing in 1976, gives the episode only a
[37:54] few opaque paragraphs and treats it as a private illness she'd
[37:59] rather not revisit. Her grandson, who eventually
[38:03] inherited her literary estate, has said that even the family
[38:07] considered the matter genuinely unresolved. 4 broad explanations
[38:12] have circled the case ever since, and they don't really fit
[38:15] together neatly. The first is the medical one, a
[38:19] true dissociative fugue triggered by grief over her
[38:22] mother's passing, sheer physical exhaustion, and the shock of
[38:27] being told that her marriage was over.
[38:30] A 2006 study by a British doctor working from Christie's later
[38:34] writings and the contemporary medical notes argued strongly
[38:39] for this reading. The second is the calculated
[38:42] publicity theory, which had its heyday in the 1920s tabloids.
[38:48] She was already an extremely successful author at that point,
[38:51] though she wasn't yet one of the most famous writers in human
[38:54] history. In the end, there's no proof
[38:58] whatsoever for this theory and it appears to have just been
[39:01] rage bait cooked up to push papers.
[39:05] The third is the deliberate revenge theory that she vanished
[39:09] consciously choosing the Hydropathic Hotel and the alias
[39:13] Teresa Neal specifically to humiliate Archie.
[39:18] Under this theory, this was done to force a public reckoning with
[39:21] his mistress and force papers to publish the name Neal and look
[39:25] into it more. The 4th advanced occasionally by
[39:28] biographers, is that she had tried to pull the curtains on
[39:32] her life but failed to do so and spent the next 11 days in an
[39:37] altered state. There's also numerous fringe
[39:41] theories about what may have happened to her, including that
[39:45] foul play may have been involved, but these are neither
[39:48] popular nor evidence based. Ultimately, each theory explains
[39:53] some details and crashes hard into others.
[39:56] The fugue diagnosis can't easily account for the alias borrowed
[40:00] from the woman who'd broken up her marriage, since it suggests
[40:04] something more deliberate. The publicity theory can't
[40:08] account for the terror she put her family through, and at any
[40:11] rate, she was already a major writer at the time anyway.
[40:15] The potential blowback of faking A disappearance would have been
[40:18] so massive as to outweigh any supposed benefits that came out
[40:23] of the publicity. The revenge theory can't explain
[40:26] her evidently sincere reluctance to ever speak about it again.
[40:31] She would have had no reason not to reveal everything in her
[40:34] autobiography, which, after all, was only published after she was
[40:39] deceased anyway. Well, perhaps there could have
[40:43] been a reason, since there was the matter of her daughter who
[40:47] spent 11 days deeply concerned about her mom.
[40:51] The idea that she tried to do it herself perhaps matches with the
[40:55] bizarre circumstances her vehicle was found in, but
[40:59] nothing after really makes sense.
[41:02] I would wonder how a woman in such a state managed to buy a
[41:04] train ticket, check into a hotel, and pass herself off as a
[41:09] charming houseguest for nearly two weeks.
[41:13] Personally, if I had to choose a theory, I believe the
[41:17] dissociative state makes the most sense.
[41:20] While it seems odd that Christy used the last name Neil, it
[41:24] could be that the name became hyper fixated in her mind at the
[41:27] time of her disappearance. There's also the theoretical
[41:32] possibility that adopting the name Neil was simply something
[41:36] of a truly bizarre coincidence. Now to break the 4th wall a bit
[41:40] here. I wrote in my script that it's a
[41:43] common enough name in Britain almost without thinking about
[41:46] it, but as I was recording for this video, I decided to Fact
[41:50] Check that. And Neil is actually incredibly
[41:53] rare at present. Based on the numbers I was able
[41:57] to find, there are only a few 100 people with that surname
[42:00] spelled the same way as Archie's girlfriend.
[42:04] In the end, what we do know is that the greatest mystery writer
[42:07] in the English language wrote 66 detective novels in her life.
[42:12] It would turn out that this one brief episode of her life would
[42:15] be, in essence, the 67th, and she would take the secrets of it
[42:19] to her grave.

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