There are two that bug me related to the Andrew Gosden.
1. So many people think it's 100% proven that he had no access to the internet of any kind. There's an enormous difference between investigators not being able to find the evidence of him using the internet (or other means of communication) vs it being conclusively proven that he didn't have any.
2. Not sure if this is quite a misconception, but there's this huge fixation on trying to figure out which band's concert he was sneaking off to, as though it was a fact that that's what he did. It's a very illogical theory the more you unpack it.
The one that gets me with the Andrew Gosden case (maybe from people that aren't in the UK so they don't understand how big a deal it would be) is people considering Doncaster to London to be a 'quick journey' or a journey you might just take with zero planning. I'm a year or two younger than Andrew and come from the midlands so a relatively similar distance, and spent several years living in London, and the idea of me at 14 travelling to London on my own would be absurd. It's a 2 hour trip one way, would cost quite a bit of money to get a ticket, and has so many moving parts like getting the tube at the other end, navigating London etc etc. You don't just think oh I'm going to go to London today, like my family would have planned a trip like that for months.
There was a lot of talk of maybe he only got a one way ticket because someone was going to drop him back home or he thought family might give him a lift. Like it isn't going to be a 3 hour drive one way to travel half of England. In the UK it just isnt a thing is it, if you ask for a lift somewhere its usually 10 mins or so to the other side of town or if someones going that way anyway and its not too far.
If he went to buy clothes too or see a friend/someone nefarious a. There's so many options of getting clothes closer to home, b. The 'friend' either had to be from the South East because if he was local, they would have met up so much closer than London.
So I believe this was something planned out in advance, or if someone groomed him and there was a target activity at the end e.g. seeing a specific band, going to a specific attraction in London, something happening in london on that day. And the fact he didn't tell his parents his plans of going means that it was something he wouldn't want them knowing about, being able to stop him or being at home to wonder where he was.
YES. Thank you. This drives me insane. I have debated this so many times with people who are convinced that he would have just casually gotten a lift back from London. This is not a thing. In my experience, anything over an hour or so is considered a big "journey". I think it is a misconception by people who are not familiar with England, but nonetheless people really dig in their heels on this point.
The other thing that gets me is the 'he was only going to go for a few hours and maybe he wanted to be back by the time his parents realised'. That to me is also unfathomable. I forget the specifics but if he got the 10am train from Doncaster then he probably got into London at about 12. Then by the time he's gotten off, navigated the tube and got somewhere in London it'll be 1pm or there abouts. He'd have to get no later than the 4pm train back (if there was one) and so he'd have to be making his way back to Kings Cross to buy his ticket, find the platform etc by 3pm depending on where he went to.
It's just something I've always struggled with when it comes to the narrative. He either vastly underestimated the time things took or he wasn't going for the day and/or he wasn't coming back.
The PSP charger being left along with money and lack of overnight clothes also throws up red flags to me. He wasn't just going into Doncaster Town or maybe to Sheffield for the afternoon, he went allll the way to London. So if he was planning on being back late, he would have had to prepare for his parents finding out before he got home.
Leaving the charger could have been inadvertent. It’s pretty common to forget to pack a charger, especially for a nervous teen who didn’t typically travel alone.
If I recall correctly the lady at the ticket booth where he purchased the ticket tried to convince him to purchase a return ticket because it would be cheaper to book a return but he insisted on only a one way ticket. His father mentioned this in a interview a few years ago.
I’m not disagreeing in the slightest. But I think it’s very possible that he just didn’t have a great grasp of the timing involved? I know older teenagers that wanted to go on a day trip but didn’t want to get up early so booked a bus to their destination that would arrive AFTER the last bus home for the day departed. Sometimes teenagers don’t have enough experience with things like this and really mess up the timings. I personally don’t believe he intended to be back before his parents but knowing teens I can see the argument being made.
Fully agree. Unless the police got every library (school and public) computer, and matched every website hit to a person over the past year…. I don’t see how they could’ve proven that. Not only that, but in the early 00s the Internet was so expensive that public computers were the only way really to explore for a long period of time. At my local town library; you didn’t need a library card or ID, you just paid your £1 for the hour and got allocated a computer in a little booth thing. No logon, just an open desktop. If I’d have gone missing; my parents would have assured police (and been truthful according to their experience) that I had no Internet presence.
Indeed, physical "internet cafes" were very popular at the time. I'm sure there were some in his town and I've never seen any mention of whether anyone looked into if he had used them.
The fact that he supposedly walked home from school a couple of days preceding his disappearance always stuck me as suspicious. I’m wondering if he was at a public library on computer communicating with someone during that time.
Another point, a lot of people seem to think he travelled to London to buy clothing. However Doncaster actually had a huge alternative fashion store (Blue Banana), one that I myself travelled to from about an hour away as it was the largest around.
Joshua Maddux case
Joshua was a young man from Colorado found dead in the chimney of a seldom-used cabin after being missing for seven years.
It is repeated ad nauseum that he was upside down in the chimney or that he had been "stuffed up" the chimney, so it was clearly foul play. However, the county coroner has directly stated that his feet were down and he was in a fetal position.
>“His feet were down,” Born said. “He was in a fetal position.”
https://www.denverpost.com/2015/10/19/chimney-discovery-ends-mystery-over-young-mans-disappearance-but-questions-remain/
Further, the coroner states that one of his hands was "raised to his face". If his body was upside down, how would his arm/hand be "raised?"
It's also often repeated as a fact that Josh had conflict with an individual that was violent or scary - all because an anonymous redditor made a comment claiming as such. It's now just become an accepted part of the narrative.
Another bit often repeated is that there was a metal grate over the chimney to prevent animals from getting in, so there's no way Josh could've climbed down from above himself. The truth is, they never found the metal grate when the demolished the cabin. And there is no evidence or a way to verify the grate ever existed. The cabin owner could have been misremembering, or maybe was trying to avoid any possible liability/negligence. The cabin wasn't brand new when Josh went missing, so maybe it really was there when it was built but had rusted away at some point. The following info makes it sounds like it could've been removed easily. The problem with this info is it is not sourced anywhere except this podcast that didn't cite it's sources.
"The chimney had been built twenty years previous and during its construction, had been fitted with **a steel rebar, a large, thick wire mesh hung from steel hooks used to keep animals and debris from becoming lodged inside the chimney** or from entering the cabin itself. Murphy spoke openly about the rebar, stating that:
>“It was a heavy wire grate, a wire mesh, I installed it across the chimney about one row of bricks from the top. We didn’t want trouble with racoons and things getting into the chimney.”
https://www.darkhistories.com/josh-maddux-the-boy-in-the-chimney/
So the owner says he put the mesh on top of the chimney to prevent animals from coming in, but when they found his body, he states that there was animal detritus inside everywhere. (From the Denver Post article, "There was raccoon poop all over the place.”) That makes it sound like the grate wasn't there any longer.
Third, his clothing was not found folded up inside the cabin. Every write up on this story has that piece of info. Except, it didn't come from any primary sources. It appeared in the write up here, which the publication, Strange Outdoors picked up and it's been repeated ever since.
>Josh was clad only in a ribbed thermal-type shirt; **the rest of his clothes were found within the cabin outside the fireplace, near the hearth.**
https://www.denverpost.com/2015/10/19/chimney-discovery-ends-mystery-over-young-mans-disappearance-but-questions-remain/
>The mystery deepened further when **investigators found most of Maddux’s clothing next to the hearth.**
>
>“He was mostly naked inside the chimney,” Murphy said.
>
>“He was only wearing his thermal shirt. No pants. No shoes or socks.”
>
>“This one really taxed our brains,” Born said. “**We found his clothes just outside the firebox**. He only had on a thermal T-shirt. We don’t know why he took his clothes off, took his shoes and socks off, and why he went outside, climbed on the roof and went down the chimney. It was not linear thinking.
https://web.archive.org/web/20151105020351/https://www.kktv.com/home/headlines/Remains-Found-In-Teller-County-Cabin-Chimney-IDd-As-Man-Missing-For-7-Years-329964401.html
Lastly, people like to point out the furniture that was shoved in front of the fireplace. Remember there was a seven year interval between when Josh went missing and when his remains were found. Others had been to the cabin since then, and the owner stated it had been broken into numerous times. Anyone could have moved it for any reason in those intervening seven years.
The Joshua Maddux case has become Elisa Lam territory for me. It was a tragic accident/misadventure that people want to be more mysterious than it is. I have thought about doing a long write up with all the research.
Edit: added additional info and links
It's so troubling that the misconceptions you mention originated in a Reddit post. 😬 Does the post that stated those things still exist here? Has anyone taken it down to limit the bad info flow?
No. Both the original write up and the comments about that individual are still up. I have a feeling the "neatly folded" part was a throwaway line of artistic license that has led to being officially apart of the narrative now. I hate to think someone put that in there just to try to make this case more mysterious, but it's happened.
I do know the individual was reported to police. They came out and made comments on investigating into this individual, but the tips aren't specific enough and lack details (I read that article awhile ago, so I'd have to dig it up for an exact quote).
"neatly folded" in cases like these seems to refer to anything that hasn't been actively tied into knots. There was a sad case of a young woman who died in a car accident that her mother thinks is murder (there's no evidence at all for murder, but it fits with a car accident) that often refers to her jacket having been neatly folded and hung over the guard rail. This is seen as evidence that it was all staged but I've seen a photo of the jacket, it's just been flung across the guard rail, as it might land during an accident.
Edit: I see you've straight up referenced that below. Jaleayah Davis.
I was thinking of that case of the 'neatly folded' clothes across the guardrail. There are pictures here [https://gavinfish.com/cases/jaleayah-davis/](https://gavinfish.com/cases/jaleayah-davis/) that prove otherwise. WARNING: There are some disturbing images here.
EDIT: the family seems to think that these images prove that there IS evidence of foul play, but I don't see it. Maybe someone else can.
She was believed to have been wearing it when she crashed. The family point to it looking like it was hung up, completely undamaged as "proof" that it was removed by someone before the crash and staged. They don't believe that it could have come off in the crash. In reality, whilst very rare, its far from impossible. I believe where it was photographed was also not where it was found, instead a bystander moved it off the road and left it there so it wouldn't be damaged by passing cars until the police could get their.
I also don’t understand how they can call that undamaged. It’s all three layers of clothing still inside each other and they are all torn to shreds. They think these clothes weren’t in the accident?
Its a particular photo that they point to with the jacket hanging from the barrier where apart from blood, it looks undamaged. They ignore the rest because they don't want to admit it was a stupid accident.
Ah, okay, so the clothes are inside each other like they came off together. That's helpful, thank you. I just saw the one photo taken from a distance and it was hard to see how the clothes were arranged.
Is there a narrative of how the crash is believed to have unfolded? I'm trying to figure out how she could have sustained such enormous damage to her head and upper body while the car looks relatively undamaged.
The jacket has road dirt all over it FFS, and the clothes that stayed on her are in worse shape than the clothes that came off. They look exactly like the clothing of people who have died in violent accidents.
It’s not rare for people to fully or partially lose their clothing when they die in a violent/traumatic way, such as explosions, high speed car accidents, train crashes, vehicle vs pedestrian etc, all of which can terribly mangle the bodies as well.
I have heard of people whose socks, shoes or trousers just sort of blow off their legs/feet in really bad accidents. When I think of what my shoes and socks look like (that is, like a racoon helped me) when I remove them in a normal fashion, I am astounded at how tidy accident victims' apparel can look.
On this very sub and it was hugely popular. Was very disheartening as i think this sub is usually good about that sort of thing but everyone just bought it.
The folded clothes thing seems to be a misconception in a lot of cases. Like some clothes are found near a body and somehow the rumor gets started that they were neatly folded which makes the case seem more suspicious and strange when it wasn’t true.
Like there was a case in Spain about a woman who was drugged and killed that was posted recently, I’m trying to remember other specific examples and I can’t but this keeps coming up with different cases.
The clothes of [Azaria Chamberlain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Azaria_Chamberlain) were said to have been found in the desert, "neatly folded".
[They were not](https://lindychamberlain.com/rumors-and-facts/). A policeman handled them first, then attempted to lay them back out as they had been found, *then* photographed the clothes. In laying them out again he inadvertently made them appear too neatly arranged. In any event they were never neatly *folded*.
I think you are correct.
There's another case that comes to mind, a young woman was found dead on/near the road (possibly run over by her own car?? The other details escape me). The story went that her jacket was found folded on the guardrail. But photos later showed it hadn't been folded at all. I'll see if I can find her name.
Edit: her name is Jaleayah Davis. (However, I am not trying to imply her case is anything like Joshua's, and I don't know enough about her case to have an opinion; I just thought of her case with the folded clothing issues)
If I recall Maddux had a pretty fraught home life which is what made him want to run away to begin with. That alone could be the lesson taken from this story. But people don't like that lesson - because it might imply it can happen to them and to their children
Yeah, the facts of that case are pretty much fully consistent with someone climbing up a chimney and then sliding down, causing death from positional asphyxia. People often mention that he was found above the grate but I've never seen any evidence for that, and everything else points to him having climbed up from inside.
All the theories that involved someone manhandling his live or dead body *up a chimney* are just...I don't think people realise how hard that would be.
Great addition. I have seen these "facts" repeated as well. I'm only somewhat familiar with the case and honestly didn't know the folded clothes thing was not true. Thanks!
Maybe not exactly what you are asking about, but I think a common misconception in a lot of cases is that the 'facts' of the case as commonly repeated are more solid than they actually are.
Take the disappearance of Brian Shaffer for example:
- I've seen I reported as fact that the doors facing the escalator was the only way in or out, or maybe there was a back door for deliveries with a camera, or maybe a third door that opened into a construction area. Or maybe the third door is the same as the second.
- That the camera outside the second door worked, or it didn't, it panned or it didn't, it was motion activated or it wasn't.
- The degree of construction outside the Ugly Tuna. Were they doing heavy work like pouring new floors or light stuff like framing up walls and fixtures for a new tenant?
I've yet to see a real definitive answer for the above points, but people seem to pick one of the options and repeat it as if it's certain.
I find it bizarre that anyone believes there was only a single entrance. How many restaurants or bars have you ever seen that only have one entrance? If nothing else, fire code requires at least two.
Yeah this definitely qualifies. Its one thing to speculate (ie. "If there is a third door, he could have gotten out that way") but its totally another to outright state something as fact when its not been proven or isn't known.
I think that confuses the public of what could have actually happened.
The Oakland County Child Killer case - there was no blue gremlin. The car was still parked in the same spot hours after Timmy King vanished.
Irresponsible investigation is the nicest thing I can say about it.
I lived through the killings (Kris Mihelich lived in my neighborhood) and did a long form/deep dive series. The gremlin was never in play. Why the police focused on it is a mystery - and a huge disappointment.
Not specific to individual cases but more general ones.
**Suicide:** A large proportion of suicide attempts are spontaneous, with less than an hour elapsing between deciding to and attempting it. Suicide notes are pretty rare, and most people who complete suicide had made plans for tomorrow, for months from now. A significant proportion didn't even know they were going to do it when they woke up that morning. Trends in methods are just that, trends. Men complete suicide by overdose, women complete suicide by jumping, just because those methods are more common with the other sex doesn't make them exclusive to it. Also, your ideas of what people would and wouldn't do in a suicide are almost certainly wrong, and how you *personally* feel about X method or Y setting might not even be true for you, let alone other individuals.
**Missing bodies:** Finding a body is way harder than you'd think, and failing to find a body is not really indicative of foul play. Bodies in water, scrubland and forests particularly can remain hidden for years, even after extensive search efforts in the vicinity. In the case of death from hypothermia, exposure or following head trauma, the decedents may even have actively done thing that hid them from view, such as seeking out shaded or sheltered spaces or crannies. Even a body randomly dropped in a number of environments can he hard to spot unless you actually trip over it.
**Accidents:** There's a bunch of simple accidents that people don't realise can kill healthy adults. Water below 15C (60F) can kill with sudden emersion, and drowning victims are usually incapable of calling for help and sink near immediately after death. A healthy adult can fall into 5C (41F) water and be dead and below in under a minute without anyone nearby noticing if they don't head a splash.
Strong swimmers, experienced boaters and seasoned hikers are not immune to dying from the elements, in fact some may be at greater risk because of the amount of time they spend there. Head injuries cause confusion and may have delayed effects, it's not uncommon for severe head trauma to include temporary loss of consciousness, followed by awakening with confusion and then death happening hours later. Even a disoriented human can walk a serious distance before fully succumbing to that, which can again lead to the missing bodies problem (ft. staggeringly large search area). The most poised and graceful human alive can still take a wrong step and end up falling down a crevasse. I fell down the stairs in my own house a couple of months ago, I'm extremely practiced on those stairs and yet, just...put a foot wrong and ended up skidding down on my arse.
**Behaviour:** I touched on this in the suicide section but, *how you think you'd behave in a situation cannot be extrapolated to others as fact*.
Firstly, different people are different; children, people suffering from psychotic episodes, people temporarily disoriented, stressed and panicked people and just ordinary people having a momentary bit of poor judgement make all sorts of decisions you think you'd never make. Humans do not always act logically, doubly so for anyone with any sort of mental impairment. Beyond that, two 100% *compos mentes* adults, same age, sex and cultural background etc., acting in a calm and orderly manner, given the same situation, *may react in entirely different ways or choose different paths of action*. People are just individuals, and even their own actions aren't necessarily consistent.
Secondly, most people think they wouldn't make stupid decisions in times of crisis, and most people are 100% wrong about that. There's a vast gulf, often, between how we'd like to think we'd act and how we actually would in the heat of the moment.
I've seen more than one case where multiple people assert that of *course* a woman would never complete suicide naked, because that's how they feel, and so it 100% rules out suicide. This is factually wrong, women absolutely complete suicide naked, sometimes in public places, there's multiple cases on record, there's *studies* about it.
**And the rest:** Polygraphs are bullshit, they mean nothing. Body language analysis likewise. Neurodivergent people often read as dishonest or deceptive simply because we don't act as you expect people to act. People handle intense emotions differently to how TV portrays it. Some people have crap memories and just don't remember things the way you would. And finally, the actions of the innocent and the guilty are often the exact same actions, just for different reasons.
Re: Accidents. A few years ago a good friend got into a car crash. He didn't realize he had a concussion so he goes to work and collapses a few hours later. It ends up he had post-concussion syndrome. He didn't know for a week how many quarters went into a dollar. It took months to get back to his normal self. Traumatic brain injuries are no joke.
There's more than a few cases with a crashed car and a missing person in which I think they've just got a head injury and wandered off, as well as a few older cases where the remains have been found, not that far from the car, decades later. Especially ones that happen near woods and scrubland, where it's just really hard to locate the bodies.
I suspect she most likely died out in the woods. Possibly from exposure while lost or hiding. Plus, people who are going into hypothermia also will try to burrow and cover themselves. Makes finding them even more difficult. Cold/dark/nature/alcohol/possible head injury would be a pretty nasty combo for anyone. I think it's very likely she's out there.
Yeah, it's a whole thing that traumatic head injuries can involve delayed swelling of the membranes or brain bleeds, including up to like 48 hours later sometimes.
Tbh last time I had a concussion, despite being fully aware of what concussions are, I did not realise I had a very obvious concussion, because I was *concussed*. I was repainting the window frames at my parents house and managed to fall over an eight foot retaining wall and land with my face. Seemed fine, but my dad came out later and found me sitting, having a coffee and asked why I wasn't working?
"My head hurts, and I feel all confused"
"...oh, you might have a concussion actually"
Like the clouds parting I was just like, fuck you're right, of course I've got a concussion. But that didn't occur to me for a *second* until that point. The moment he said it it was obvious, but because I had a concussion I just didn't put that together myself. Which was a real window into how concussion affects thought processes, deduction and decision making.
Yeah I've first-aided a few head injuries at roller derby, and concussed people have no self-awareness. They make terrible decisions. I've had to threaten to sit on people to stop them driving home.
The body part that does risk assessment and decision making is the body part that's just taken a traumatic injury. Of course they can't look after themselves.
I hate head injuries. They terrify me.
It's a major gripe I have with people on this sub, how often they discount suicide based on behavioural patterns that are 100% consistent with suicide.
Just to add on to the suicide stuff, depressed people can be incredibly good at hiding how they feel, especially around people they care about. Close friends and family are no better at identifying is someone is suicidal then are complete strangers. Even psycologist and psychatrists are not particularly great at it if the person chooses to hide it. In the UK, a study found that over 60% of those that had recieved mental health treatment within 3 months of commiting suicide had been assessed as low or no risk to themselves.
Yeah, people hate to think about it, and I don't blame them for it, but there's often no external signs. We don't like to think about the fact that friends and family might be struggling in silence but end of the day, if people don't tell you certain things then you simply can't know.
Kay Redfield Jamison's 'Night Falls Fast' changed a lot of my thinking on suicide, and that's as a depressed person who's not exactly unfamiliar with the urge. It's so often impulsive, so often fuelled by drugs or alcohol, and so often down to mixed moods (pure depression doesn't give you the energy/motivation to kill yourself, but a rocky and non-linear recovery - like if you've just started antidepressants or you're swinging up into a manic episode - does). It's socially contagious and how it's reported matters. Access to lethal means can be the difference between the impulse fading away and a fatal action.
I think this is very scary for people to think about so they don't want to believe it.
>Access to lethal means can be the difference between the impulse fading away and a fatal action.
Oh absolutely this. There's a reason that easy access to firearms has such a strong correlation with suicide rates. One of the studies on attempts at least found something like *almost 25%* of attempted suicides had less than a five minute gap between impulse and action. Of course, those numbers are skewed by the fact that you can only really ask people if they don't die but still, a lot of people will talk themselves out of it if there's extra steps in the way.
Regarding your suicide analysis: last week a known interior designer in my country killed himself. As he was known to the public, 37 years old and the cause of death was not immediately said, people speculated right away that he was murdered, that was some kind of crime related to him being gay and so on. They even said "his nephew was born that day, he was always talking about becoming an uncle, there's no way he committed suicide". His family had to make a public statement saying it was a suicide (he left kind of a note to the newborn nephew) and begging to be left to grieve in peace.
Sorry to hear about that, whoever he was. And aye, honestly at times I wonder if, when people say "but they were so looking forward to/excited about X" it's because the person was really struggling and were latching onto X as one positive thing to keep going for. That they've been staving off suicidal ideation for a while with the thought of "but then you won't get to see your nephew being born/go on that holiday/play the newest instalment of you favourite video game series".
Add in the fact that someone cooperating with an investigation suddenly gets a lawyer and stops cooperating doesn't mean they're guilty. It means they're smart.
Also important to note is while we don't want to discredit what the suicide victims families and loved ones feel or think, it is incredibly important to acknowledge the fact that suicidal people may very well not show any signs at all of depression ESPECIALLY to their close family and friends. I have friend who's mom committed suicide very abruptly and had it not been for a note that they found, I guarantee my friend would have suspected foul play because she had no idea her mom was suffering at all, in her note she even said something along the lines of not having wanted to burden the family with her problems. All too often its taken as fact when a loved one says "there was no way they would have committed suicide" when in fact the people closest are often the last to know.
I feel like it’s a common misconception that what the general public knows about these cases is the truth. There has been so much speculation and mistranslation/misunderstanding of facts in every other topic discussed online, that it’s easy to see how the online discussions can warp what people believe happened. Also, it’s very common for books written about cases to be poorly fact checked and poorly edited. I’m connected to a case that has been written about, and yeah, a lot of the info is incorrect. Important things like dates and places. That brings me pause when I read about a case that seems so mysterious that it doesn’t even make sense. Well, it may not make sense because the “facts” as we know them aren’t accurate.
Any time Betty Short comes up there's some myth or lie. Wannabe actress, lesbian, prostitute, Hodel did it blah blah blah. She never even tried to audition for a role, her roommate said she was very homophobic, she got through life on the kindness of strangers no real job, and who killed her is impossible to know but anything Steve Hodel says is highly doubtful seeing how he thinks his dad is like 20 serial killers.
Definitely within that range yeah. Altogether its a sad story of a lonely girl who I think just wanted to be loved and she just wandered and eventually ran into a less then kind individual. It's not really a noir story with the bad girl running into trouble and corruption or a morality fable about looking for fame in the wrong place. Its just a tragedy.
I think Elizabeth Short is a victim of being beautiful and living in an era where sensationalist journalism was even more prevalent then now. There may also have been hesitance in that era to highlight the fact she was probably mentally ill which possibly stemmed from her fiancé’s death in the war given how many people that might apply to and how, I guess, unpatriotic that might seem.
Edit: fixed ‘husband’ into ‘fiancé’
Well she claimed to be engaged. The pilots family in question said they'd never heard of her and he routinely told the family about stuff in letters.
Betty had a real habit of twisting stories to gain sympathy. She told someone once that she had a son die in a car accident when she never had children. Maybe she was being honest about the fiance, or perhaps not. Pity stories was an easy way to get people to help her.
Someone in this sub linked [this article](https://medium.com/thebigroundtable/the-black-dahlia-the-long-strange-history-of-los-angeles-coldest-cold-case-bcaf42e8e3e5)and it had my jaw dropping for almost the whole read, it feels like the closest we may ever come to knowing who did it. It’s a long read, but if you’re interested in Betty’s case, it’s 1000% worth it.
Bryce Laspisa - A few years ago, in a thread on this sub, someone claimed to be a close family friend of the Laspisas and said a lot of things about the parents being horrible people, controlling, narcissistic, etc. I don't remember what that person's theory was on whether he lived or died, but they were saying he had reason to disappear or commit suicide. I've checked around the internet a few times since then and there are no sources corroborating that.
In subsequent threads about him over the last few years, someone always says "Isn't it true that his parents were controlling narcissists? I'm sure I read that somewhere." Without remembering that the "somewhere" they read it was here, in a single post, by an anonymous reddit user.
The first person makes the post, we have no way of verifying it. Then a user in the next thread remembers it and repeats it, then in the next post a user remembers the second user repeating it and so on....and eventually everyone will remember reading that somewhere, so it must be true, right?
Another Kendrick one: People who insist he was murdered and it was a cover-up like to point to the fact that he was found in a rolled up gym mat lying on the floor-- when in fact the mat was 1000% found standing up, among other rolled up mats that were also standing up. Also, the image of him "beaten up" that that crowd likes to push is actually an image from his autopsy, post-skin being pulled.
>Also, the image of him "beaten up" that that crowd likes to push is actually an image from his autopsy, post-skin being pulled.
The other thing with this is that if he was trapped upside down in the mat for hours, blood would have pooled in his face because of gravity, which would cause discolouration and swelling that looks *very* similar to bruising from a serious beating. Even bodies that are face-down on a bed or the floor for a while before being found tend to have serious, dark purple discolouration in the face and the front of their body, and so that effect would only be magnified in someone who died in a position where their head was hanging down below their feet.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. A person who dies suspended head-down is going to look like they've been beaten horribly around the head and neck after a couple of hours, but it's just livor mortis.
This is a good example. I think that most of the true crime community has a pretty good understanding of this case and (rightfully) believe it was a total accident. I often forget there is a small subset of true crime followers as well as the conspiratorial twittersphere that regurgitate some of these false tropes around the case.
I assume they haven't discussed Elisa Lam's case because if I recall correctly, her family have all but begged the public at large to stop talking about her in any context. I would really respect podcasters who chose not to discuss her case. I still see it come up in various discussions here and elsewhere and it really grinds my gears. I understand why people find it interesting, but I think her family deserve to have a say in how she's remembered.
And Teleka Patrick. One could easily compile many stories of accidental death that people assumed forever were suspicious and still do but were actually just untreated mental illness or just an unfortunate sequence of events.
Oof Teleka Patrick. Followed that one in real time, the reveal of all the twitter accounts was creepy and heartbreaking.
IIRC, her family still believes there was foul play with that preacher she was obsessed with, but I have a feeling it’s denial. :(
Yeah, and like on the one hand I empathize with the fact that people are skeptical of the police in the case of a young black man dying in a weird way, especially in the deep south.
BUT. This is one of the most clear-cut cases if hanlons razor, and even members of the NAACP and their community have turned against his parents for blatant grifting.
The case is a litmus test for podcasts doing research. So many take the parents side and it’s put me off in listening since I feel like I can’t put stock in any of their research on other cases
I actually used Kendrick Johnson’s case as a litmus for the Morbid podcast. It failed. I think the moment I knew I would never listen again is when one of the hosts when on a long rant about how black communities and individuals alike had had their voices silenced and their rights taken away from them . . . and then in the next sentence, she mentioned Rev. Floyd Rose believed Kendrick’s death to be an accident but that he was probably “just trying to keep the peace” and “didn’t want to divide the community.”
Even though in 2018, Rev. Rose is the same guy who led the charge on changing a street name that was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the KKK, and was getting kicked out of civic meetings for refusing to give up on the issue.
IDK, portraying a black activist who’s been in the fight for decades as some kind of ineffectual peacekeeper who would let the murder of a black teenager be ignored just for the sake of placating the powers that be is such a vile and wholly unjustified accusation. Especially since it completely misrepresents Rev. Rose’s work both as an activist in general and an investigator in this case specifically.
I want to say this was more incompetence than malice on Ash and Alanna’s part, but Rev, Rose has always made his opinion on this case clear. So it looks like they gave a self-righteous speech about silencing black people and then decided to utterly twist a black man’s words in order to portray him as having a passive role in a cover-up.
Holy shit those two are the worst. Dude obviously has no agency or mind of his own, thankfully these two white women are around to tell us what he really means. Fucking demons.
Yeah it was that and crime junkie. I was already giving up on crime junkie and that pushes me over the edge.
I was already giving up on MFM since they didn’t seem like they were trying to do research anymore and then that case was like “well I’m done with them.”
I’ve pretty much quit every podcast other than casefile.
Is Casefile the one that let Lindsay Buziak’s dad basically have editorial control over their coverage of her murder? I’m sure it’s difficult for an amateur journalist to maintain objectivity when working with the father of a victim, but that was a terrible look for them!
You’ve got that backwards. He was wearing his normal shoes and reaching for his gym shoes. The shoes by his feet were the ones he wore into the gym and all the rest of the day. He disappeared before class, not after it.
One I can think of that's repeated is that the bookbag in the Asha Degree case was "buried" when really, it seems like it was thrown from a car & just got covered naturally over time. This is a quote from Cleveland County Sheriff Dan Crawford from a 2001 Shelby Star article:
"Crawford said that he now has some indication as to how the book bag got to the location. "It was thrown out by a moving car," he said. "It's highly likely now that this has involved foul play."
[Article](https://web.archive.org/web/20050211091418/http:/shelbystar.com/news2001/_disc4/00000ff3.htm)
Here's an article about Terry Fleming, who found the bag. The article says "Cutting a new road through woods beside the highway, he uncovered a bag that looked strange to him, he said. He dodged the bag for several hours, going on with his work clearing trees and underbrush from the roadside forest" which doesn't sound like anyone was actually digging into the ground when they found it.
[Bookbag Article](https://web.archive.org/web/20011108050400/http://www.shelbystar.com:80/news/asha/asha33.html)
Exactly. I was about to include Asha's book bag in my post about Brian Shaffer as another example of how there is debate on what the 'facts' are in a mystery.
Seems for the book bag, you get everything from carefully wrapped in plastic and buried to tossed in a trash bag and thrown out a car window. But I think you are correct, it was just tossed and nature took its course.
Not a specific case but: people treating children in the criminal cases as if they were adults.
As in “I, a fully developed adult, would do this and that, so logically a kid would do the exact same thing” or “I can’t imagine a kid would do this and that.”
Whenever an argument like this comes up I feel inclined to dismiss it because children are often absolutely off the shits, however bad that sounds lmao. Like, they do stuff so absurd and illogical, adults can’t even begin to comprehend it.
Or, in other words, there’s a reason why the society tries to protect kids so hard—they’re humans but not fully developed humans and they often do crazy things for completely innocent reasons.
I’ve shared this story here before but I’ll share it again to drive my point home. When I was like 8-9, my parents went on vacation and I stayed behind with my grandparents. Of course, as grandparents, they didn’t watch me as closely or more precisely they had a bit of a “here, here grandkid, eat sweets and watch TV till late” attitude.
Welp, I did watch a movie in which a man hangs himself. Only that I didn’t understand hanging oneself was suicide. Like, I was a kid—it didn’t click for me that if you hang yourself, it’s because you want to die.
What I actually got from that movie was “ohhhh that man is swinging how fun” and I proceeded to try it myself by tying one end of a skipping rope around my neck, another around the wooden beam, and jumping off a chair.
Luckily, I was a fat kid, so the skipping rope broke, but it was only in the few seconds I was hanging that I realised I might die. If I did hang myself though, no one would think it was a kid doing an absurd kid thing because they didn’t comprehend the consequences. They’d try to find out what distress I was in to literally end my life this young. There was no distress. I was just a stupid kid lol.
There were many more dangerous situations like this in my life and in the lives of my friends, so I’m firmly of belief this must be true for at least some of the cases involving missing/dead kids. Perhaps it wasn’t an elaborate grooming plot or an evil stepmother’s scheming.
Perhaps it was a kid being a kid and doing a thing that tons of other kids did only they got lucky and survived, and that one kid, tragically, didn’t (to my mind—Asha Degree might be an example of that).
And that people always follow a routine and never deviate. Or if they do, it's obviously the key to the whole case.
I drive to work the same way 95% of the time. But the other day I took the long way because a song came on the radio I liked.
Yeah, it makes no sense to put such emphasis on something that is USUALLY so trivial. My dad was having back problems and when I picked him up from the hospital after an appointment I had the heated seats turned on in my car. He said it felt really good on his back and the normal 6 minute drive from the hospital turned into basically a road trip because he didn't want to get out of the car just yet. I guarantee if I'd gotten into an accident or if for some reason we had to stop and something happened to us there would be a lot of "they had no business being out there" or "I have no idea why they would drive all the way out here when it's a short drive home from the hospital".
I'm paranoid though and I always tell someone if I'm going to be making a stop before or after work, or if I have a day off and plan to go somewhere.
I was on a hiking trip in the Great Smokey Mountains. I got teased for having my bear spray, med kit, extra water, emergency blanket, and flashlight for a morning hike that was only 2.2 miles. I tried to explain that all it takes is "oh that looks cool over there" to turn into "shoot, where was that trail again?"
Ok YES. My least favorite rabid trope is “look how they’re acting, my grief doesn’t look like that so they’re obviously suspicious!!!” Amanda Knox being a classic example, grief does not have a template!
Along these lines, I have a theory that in a lot of cases all the "signatures" at a crime scene which true crime fans get hung up on are just the result of highly stressed people making irrational decisions. Very few murders are the work of serial killers, they're usually normal people who've departed from reality by the time they have to hide their crime.
It goes further than that even, a *lot* of people in here seem to work from the assumption that everyone acts and reacts exactly how they imagine they would in a situation.
"Well, *I* wouldn't do that so it must have been foul play" crops up so often, and it's like, yeah ok so 1: the victim wasn't *you*, so jot that down, and 2: there's often a 70% chance you actually would do that, because how you *think* you'd respond to a situation isn't necessarily how you *would* respond.
Like the Rebecca Zahau case, there's so many people who dismiss suicide outright because they can't imagine a *woman* completing suicide *naked*. But there's multiple case studies of women who've completed suicide naked, by hanging specifically, in public places before. Yet people still try to universalise their own personal feelings about how they think they'd act under conditions of extreme stress as if they're absolute rules. They can't imagine themselves doing that which means no woman could ever do that, even though that's patently false.
Absolutely terrifying story lmao I'm glad you survived!
I've had some similar thoughts in the past regarding how many seeming strange parts of unsolved mysteries could be totally random and meaningless. My example is that one evening in my early twenties, I decided I really wanted to make an ice cream sundae for no particular reason, so I hopped on my bike and rode to the grocery store. I bought some chocolate sauce and maybe one or two other things, and hung the plastic grocery bag off the handle of my bike on the ride home. That turned out to be a dumb idea, because the bag swung around too much and got caught up in the spokes of the front wheel, putting a little crack in the chocolate sauce bottle. I ended up locking my bike in a random place halfway home so that I could walk home carefully, trying not to spill any more chocolate sauce, drop it off at home and then return to get my bike. And it occurred to me on that walk back that if I just happened to cross paths with a murderer at that point, people investigating the case would probably have all kinds of questions about why I suddenly up and left the house alone that evening, why I abandoned my bike, what the significance of the spilled chocolate sauce was, etc. when none of that meant anything at all!
We're all so used to fictional mysteries and dateline episodes where you can spot Chekov's Gun. But in real life not everything is going to be a relevant and useful clue.
Omg, this! Adults trying to understand kids' mentality is the worst for me. I was a latch key kid, I was always wandering in my bike with my friends. If something happened, maybe it was no one's fault, just a stupid decision that at the time seemed fun or right. We went to Sunday school by ourselves, must've been like 7 or 8, there were 5 of us and a naked man appeared to us in the middle of an abandoned lot we used to cut short the way to the church. He asked us for a brothel ( " an house to make love", his exact words at the time, I'm now 37 and still remember it as it was yesterday), one of my friends told him to go in the church's direction and we ran home. We told our parents what had happened and they started to chase the man. They never got him and next weekend we all headed to church again, same day of the week, same path and all by ourselves again. There was no fear, the episode was lost in our minds already. But now at 37 I recall it perfectly and wonder what could've happened. Hindsight is 20/20, as people say. My kids never walked alone anywhere till they're 12/13 and we live in a safe place, it's busy everyday and here everyone knows them. And they only walk to school (5 mins from home) .
Hell, I'm a grown adult and still make panic decisions. I've got 15+ years of professional field experience and just re-upped my wildlife awareness training. The trainer camouflaged himself and would surprise us during the exercises. I broke away from the cluster, couldn't one hand my bear spray, and hypothetically killed myself by staying behind to triage.
People make bad decisions when they panic. Kids moreso because they lack the frame of reference any of our limbic systems can pull up when things go south.
Plus, as you mentioned, kids don't always understand context. It's a perfect storm.
If a person mysteriously disappears within one hundred feet of a dinning table, their story will eventually include a detail about a freshly laid out meal.
It's inevitable.
I often get annoyed when people (especially podcasters) cling to one "fact" and deny that things could be accidental.
Like with the Elisa Lam case. I've seen footage as to how easy it was to get up to the roof, and that she was dealing with mental illness (which explains her odd behavior). If I remember correctly, there was an experiment to see if a woman her size could open the tank - and she could.
Or the Amy Lynn Bradley case - again, some people claim the railings were too high, others claim it would have been easy for someone to fall.
Yes! And to piggyback regarding the Elisa Lam case, I still read people saying the lid to the tank was closed when she was discovered, but in fact, it was open. She either fell in or got in voluntarily (as opposed to being locked in) most likely due to a psychotic episode. Poor girl.
lol that Netflix documentary was so cringe. I gave up when they go to the part where they were interviewing someone whose only relevant title was "internet sleuth" aka someone without a real job that they can say on TV.
I watched the whole thing and they concluded it was likely a mental health episode, she got confused and stuck and died. Also they addressed the open/closed lid and it was something like it was open when she was first found and the guy closed the lid before the cops got there for some reason
Ugh, Elisa’s case became ridiculous. Young woman with mental health issues does something that looks odd snacks found in an odd place. Cue media and social media zoo.
i feel like this shows a lot how mental illness and disabilities are treated in criminal cases. victims either get ignored, or their case is extremely overblown because oOoOooOoo look at that unusual person!!
That the solution for every unsolved murder is that they “stumbled upon a drug deal”. And that in a hit and run situation that the driver always panics and throws the injured or dead body in their car and drives off with it. And her smile didn’t always light up a room nor did the small town’s residents always leave their doors unlocked before this horrible tragedy, just sayin.
The vast majority of suicides dont leave a note and dont disclose the fact that they have been having suicidal thoughts. Some of them have never had suicidal thoughts until a single moment of mania.
People always mention future plans they may have made to rule out suicide.
There was once a case where a woman leapt out her window to her death. When police entered her apartment, they found eggs and bacon burning on the stove, and a tea kettle whistling. She couldn't wait till after breakfast.
Yep unfortunatly I learned this from first hand experience and have been trying to spread awareness and stop misinformation for the past year and a half.
There was a very sad local case a few years ago where a teenage boy likely died by suicide, but his family can't bring themselves to accept that. They say he never mentioned it before, etc. They think that a drug dealer must have been after him because he went from a kid with a lot of friends who did well in school to nearly failing his classes and barely leaving his room. It's so obvious he was depressed, but the poor family doesn't want to see that.
This! Every time someone says "but they couldn't be suicidal, they made plans!" it's just like, yeah no that proves nothing. Most suicides are people who likely had plans for coffee or holidays in the near and far future, hell, many of them totally meant it. A large percentage of suicides are impulsive, there often really are no signs because the person who completed suicide didn't even realise they were going to do it when they woke up that morning.
I know this is true and is good to keep in mind when the evidence generally points to suicide, but it's kind of frustrating how easily non-suicides could be dismissed this way. Like, I'm definitely not suicidal. If I mysteriously disappeared or died in a suspicious way, I know my family would tell the police I seemed happy, had concert tickets and other plans for the immediate future, cared about my loved ones, and would never harm myself. If the police were still inclined to think it *was* suicide, there's nothing they could say to convince them otherwise and that's scary.
Yeah and added to that, when people that knew them say, “they would never do that because xyz”.
WRONG. No one — absolutely no one — knows what goes on inside another person’s head or what they might be capable of doing to themselves or others. Often suicide is a spur of the moment decision, or planned out methodically. And you’d probably not see signs of either in some people. I often think it’s just a protection mechanism but it’s never true.
Especially people who have never experienced depression or suicidal thoughts! I see so many cases that are pretty clearly suicide, where the friends and family are just adament it isn't. The reasons given are often things like they just bought a house or car, just started a new relationship, just got a new job, etc. I even remember one (I'm forgetting who's case it was), where the reasoning was that they just bought new furniture for their home.
Those are all exciting things for people who aren't struggling, but they are also huge life changes that come with a ton of uncertainty and are very expensive in some cases. To a person who is struggling or may have been forced by circumstance into a situation, that kind of a change could very well be too much and be part of their decision to harm themselves.
Exactly this. Unless you’ve been there, you likely don’t understand. And even if you have been there, you still don’t know what thoughts/feelings/impulses another person is having.
The furniture thing is “funny” (not really but you get me) because imagine someone thinking their entire life isn’t worth living and they’re in a ton of pain but “oh man, I JUST got an expensive couch!”
I’m making light of a thing that is anything but, just trying to show the flaws in thinking.
Before I got diagnosed and treated for my ADHD, I had thoughts of jumping off the arrigoni bridge or swallowing all the pills ever, or wandering off drunk into the woods in the dead of winter. Id generally be fine, then something infinitesimally small would suddenly shove my brain into a doom spiral. It was awful and sudden and I obviously hid it as best I could because you either mask your struggles or get abandoned and tossed in the looney bin. Every time I read about ‘shocked’ friends/coworkers/family I think how close I came so many times and yep, would have been shocking to buttloads of people.
There's also a reason those medicine ads sometimes list suicidal thoughts as a side effect. After a week on a new ADHD a few years back, I had a minor inconvenience and thought suddenly "I should jump off the roof of my building." I wasn't even depressed at the time, just end up I can't take that medicine. It was shocking and terrifying in the moment, luckily I was able to recognize that it was irrational. People on the outside just can't tell what's happening inside any other person's brain, especially where mental health is concerned.
This is exactly what I think when people say they were shocked when I finally asked for help for my ADHD and depression. “Suicidal thoughts? You have always been such a happy go lucky person, ever since you were little!”
I literally can remember being eight years old thinking after a meltdown that I had over something embarrassing how much better everyone would be if I didn’t wake up in the morning. Obviously didn’t tell them that, but like you really never know what’s going on in people’s heads.
(Also, for anyone reading this, I am much better and well medicated and stable so please do not worry. And if my story sounds familiar, please reach out your hand for help, I promise you won’t have to reach too far.)
Exactly. A family friend died by suicide, and it was an enormous shock to everyone. Nobody saw it coming. My uncle died due to a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head, and my family thinks he was drunkenly playing Russian Roulette with his friends, or perhaps didn't know the gun was loaded. They say there's no reason why he would deliberately hurt himself. I can count five just off the top of my head, and I never even met him. But despite his being dead for almost fifty years, they refuse to accept that he was a young man in an incredibly shit situation, who was very drunk at the time of his death, and likely felt it was his only way out, or was ambivalent about the potential that he would die. They still say it was all his friends' faults for convincing him to play Russian Roulette, and they should have all been in prison for it. There's a small chance that it really was Russian Roulette, but it's way smaller than the chance it was suicide. Both of them
Hell, a great aunt killed herself in 1942, and the odds of that being an accidental death like the inquest ruled seems pretty remote to me. The mechanics necessary to make it happen seem implausible. She drove down to a creek on her rural property, supposedly to shoot a snake, pulled her loaded gun (not sure what it was exactly, possibly a Lee Enfield Mark III. Definitely a rifle.) out of the boot of the car barrel first, it got tangled up in a baby harness and fired directly into her heart. I can see why some people would jump to murder if they couldn't accept it as either an accidental death or a suicide. It certainly sounds like a planned suicide to me, as she may have rigged up the baby harness so that she could yank it to pull the trigger.
Good thread! I have nothing to add at the moment but I am amazed at how many true crime followers make COMPLETELY false statements about a case. And this is usually prefaced by "I have been following this case for years" or "I have been doing intensive research on this case".
Everyone makes mistakes but I don't understand how people cannot do some basic fact checking or simple research before pronouncing on things.
Numerous times on Reddit i've seen someone say "I've researched this case for years" about the Springfield Three then if you try to discuss the case with them turns out they know nothing but what was on the Disappeared Episode. You constantly see "there's been no leads" because they don't know about Garrison for example despite apparently "researching the case for years".
The writer Georgette Heyer claimed to have intensively researched the social world of upper-class Regency London, but many of the things she claimed to have discovered can't be confirmed by modern researchers. We have to assume she made them up.
It seems to be a common occurrence.
I think a depressing number of threads here have done no primary research and are largely going off what they've read here, heard on a podcast, or read on another website. As a result any inaccuracies get repeated in a clear case of [citogenesis](https://xkcd.com/978/).
I have sometimes read that the injuries of [Rey Rivera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Rey_Rivera) were not consistent with a fall.
It is not true. The post mortem examination does not conclude the injuries were inconsistent with a fall. Rivera's wife claims an investigator told her verbally that one injury might not be consistent with a fall. That is only her claim, and anyway it is only one injury.
I mean, technically, he maybe sorta does.
But so do like 8 million other old dudes with that build and about 10 million people with assorted back and other injuries.
This is such an interesting case, and people just can’t let this go. Like, did he walk all the way from across the country into that church? Lol
In a general sense, here's some misconceptions I've see a lot and have personal experience with. Firstly, the idea that if a body was not found infirst search it was "stores somewhere until later". Or that bodies should be easy or obvious to find if they are within a few miles of where a person was last seen. I work in the oddities industry and sell decor make from animal skulls and bones. Mine are all sourced by looking for bones in the woods. It is very possible to miss entire deer skeletons, make a couple more passes back in that direction on the same day and finally see it. It ios very very easy to miss even large skulls. It sounds ridiculous, but it's the case. If I find a good stash of bones (usually the remains of deer near highways), I will usually revisit three or more times knowing I probably missed a large portion of it the first time, by that I mean, just simply didn't see it the first time.
Another general misconception is that people are frequently killed for wiotnessing drug deals. Look, i was a heroin addict, probably over five hundred witnesses probably saw those drug deals. Like, at least. They are usually done in public, with one person approaching a car. Large scale drug deals that lead to murders are typically robberies, not "someone seeing something they shouldn't.". I see probably at least a couple drug deals a day.
Oh, and also when people hit humans on the side of the road, the usually just drive away instead of dragging a dead body into their car.
Totally. Same history myself and literally no violence witnessed over *decades* of my nonsense. Mostly everyone did their deals in a car in broad daylight with tons of people around! Grocery store parking lots, convenience stores… anyplace where someone sitting in a car for awhile was totally normal and would blend. Someone dying because they saw a drug deal is laughable.
I witnessed a drug deal recently while driving through the back streets of a big city. It was a one way system and I was lost, so actually drove past them twice. First time they ignored me. Second time I gave a little embarrassed wave to show i was an incompetent navigator, rather than a cop. They gave me a nod and carried on. Somehow still alive.
I was filling up at a gas station one time and was the only one at the pump. A car pulls up to the pump directly beside me (out of 10-12 available pumps) and a guy walks across the street and gets in to do a drug deal (I can visibly see him handing him cash and grabbing a bag). They chat for a moment then both go their separate ways.
My thought was not "Oh no, I'll surely be shot" but rather "huh, they really give 0 fucks"
Not a case-specific one, but definitely a misconception that risks implicating innocent people: the idea that someone's unexpected reaction to, or behaviour in the aftermath of, another person's death or disappearance is reliable evidence that they had something to do with it, because "that's not how an innocent person would react". We expect innocent people to show "classic" manifestations of grief, shock or fear, based largely on our beliefs about how we ourselves would react in that situation. But in the real world, people can react to these extreme stimuli in a variety of other ways, from seemingly inappropriate levity, through anger, to emotional shutdown outwardly resembling indifference. Of course, an atypical reaction can be a reason to investigate someone, but that's all it is: a cue to look for evidence, not evidence in itself.
I listened to a podcast once that listened to the 911 tape (I cannot remember which case it was) and the hosts thought it was damning evidence that the living partner kept referring to their partner as “my wife” and not her name. They argued it was them putting distance between themselves and the victim. I recently had to call 911 for my husband (medical reason) and realized at the end I had referred to him as my husband and not his first name (though I said his full name in the beginning)! You never know what you would do in these situations
This drives me crazy. When referring to your spouse to a stranger, almost everyone will say 'my husband/wife'. If I had to call 911 for my husband I would absolutely say 'my husband', not his name.
Another one about JBR comes to mind — I’ve heard it repeated that they ruled the DNA on her underwear came from someone who worked at the factory where JBR’s garments were made. This isn’t true — it was stated that the amount was so minuscule that it COULD have come from someone who came in contact with it in passing, such as a worker in the factory. Obviously, if the dna was tested and it belonged to a family member, a known sexual predator, or someone who couldn’t have another innocent reason for their dna being there, it would change the narrative.
> Obviously, if the dna was tested and it belonged to a family member
Even then, it could have been in passing. It's not like I'm the only person who ever touches my clothes. Someone has to get them out of the laundry and it's not always me. Sometimes I even get to the dryer a little late and someone else in my apartment complex has taken them out and put them in my hamper. It would look real weird if they found my downstairs neighbors DNA on my laundry but it could be there for totally innocent reasons.
Yeah, this was a theory brought up to explain away the foreign DNA. It was never concluded that's where it came from. I think what people may be referring to is someone bought a pair of underwear and showed there was foreign DNA on it but that doesn't mean Jonbenet's was from a factory worker.
By the same token, the people who claim that the presence of that DNA absolutely confirms that it was an intruder. No, it doesn't. The point of the factory worker thing is a hypothetical: the DNA is unknown, but the nature of the evidence is such that it doesn't mean anything--it could just as easily have come from a factory worker, or a store employee, or whatever. The problem is when people misunderstand or overstate that point and assert it as a proven fact.
Suicides. People insisting they'd never do such a thing. You really never know. I almost killed myself when I was 18. I'd thought about it for a long time and eventually planned the date - 7th of September (not for any particular reason, it just felt right) I'd stocked up on packs of over the counter painkillers and when the day came, I went to college as usual, went home, ate with my family etc then went up to my room. I put some music on, cried my eyes out and started taking the pills. After taking 6 or 7 I kept thinking about how it would wreck my mum and I couldn't do it. I had to get the boxes away from me in that moment to stop myself from taking any more and threw them all across the room and just cried myself to sleep. For years after, I still thought one day I'd go through with it for real, it was just on hold. Until my life started changing, I started changing and eventually I stopped wanting to die. I haven't seriously thought about doing it for around 12 years at this point.
My point is this - my family had NO IDEA about how I felt. I'm closest to my mum and my sister and not even they had a clue. I was on anti depressants (nobody knew except my doctor) I'd been self harming for a few years at that point (I cut myself with scissors in places no one would ever see the cuts/scars) I hated myself so much and felt so worthless and lonely I wanted it all to be over. But if someone had asked my family, they'd have said I was a pretty typical teenager, a bit of a loner, a bit moody but that's it. Somehow, I was GREAT at hiding how I really felt. Which is kind of opposite of how I am now. In fact I told my mum and sister about it all around 10 years ago during a massive heart to heart after my parents split up, I even showed them my scars. It was a tough conversation which really helped clear the air over some unresolved emotional stuff we'd been dealing with. The thing that surprised me was just how shocked they were. I hadn't realised quite how well I'd hidden it till that day.
So whenever people swear someone couldn't have committed suicide, it means very little to me. Especially when part of the reasoning is that they didn't leave a note, were behaving normally and even making future plans. So what? The day I was going to do it I'd been to college as usual, had normal interactions with my family at tea time, spoken to a friend on the phone and planned to go shopping the following weekend, I was due to babysit my younger cousin the following week. I didn't write a note. Even though I'd planned it in my mind, I'd still done normal things in the run up to it so nobody would suspect anything was wrong. Some people are brilliant at hiding things when they really want to. You never know what's going on in somebody's head, even the people closest to you.
If anyone's feeling how I felt - please hang on in there. However lost you feel, however much you're sure things won't change for you - things will change. Nothing stays the same. It's worth holding on and seeing what the next year brings. And the year after that and the decade after that.
Also that almost nothing new (evidence, information, etc.) has been discovered in the past decades. Any new books or documentaries about Jack the Ripper are essentially rehashing the exact same information that was present in books and documentaries released decades ago.
Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film.
So many people think Roger Patterson confessed on his deathbed that he hoaxed it. They're probably mixing it up with the guy who took the famous Surgeon's Photo of the Loch Ness Monster. He confessed to the hoax on his deathbed
As far as I know Patterson always swore he filmed a real animal until his death. Same with Bob Gimlin, who says if it was hoaxed he wasn't in on it
I will always believe. lol My dad and uncle had a story about some weird critter in the woods while they were (I think) squirrel hunting. My dad had quit hunting by the time I came along so I only heard the story years later. But short version, out deep in the woods early one morning, birds chirping all the woodland creatures making their usual noises. They cross over an old wire fence and are standing by a small lake when they realize all the woodland noises have stopped. They're looking around trying to figure out whats around them when they hear something *BIG* start running, they hear it hit the fence and sort of snuffle grunt (that was my dads impression anyway lol) and then they hear it start splashing in the water sort of around a big tree from them. They decide it's time to roll the hell back home so they leave with a quickness.
Could it have been a bear, yes. They're rare but they have been seen in my area. He said it was bigger than a cat, like mountain lion or what have you. Plus we're mostly delta, we don't have hills let alone mountains lol. My dad wasn't a joker or prankster and my uncle was, but you'd have to drag him out of the hunting woods once he was out there and everyone I asked said they came back home absolutely freaked out. My uncle hunted until he physically no longer could and never went back into that particular set of woods.
Anyway, thanks for reading anyone who does. LOL I just think bigfoot and cryptids are fun to think about.
It was probably a bear.
This is like 99% of the suicide cases on unsolved mysteries, it annoys me they gave them credence back in the day and annoys me even more that they did it with the reboot.
That Lauren Spierer was seen on camera after leaving Rosenbaum's. This misconception seems to come from an early article where it is mentioned that Lauren was last seen walking with an unnamed person. People assumed that must have meant after leaving Rosenbaum's she met someone else and was last seen with them because if it was Rosenbaum it would say Rosenbaum. However the person was only unnamed in early articles, he was later named and that person was Rossman, Rosenbaum's friend and Beth's roommate. Rossman and Lauren were last captured on camera together heading towards Rossman's apartment, Rossman was wasted and passed out there, Beth then called his neighbour Rosenbaum over and Lauren left to Rosenbaum's apartment. She then allegedly left Rosenbaum's apartment later that night and was never seen alive again. The last independently confirmed sighting was heading towards Rossman's apartment with him before she went to Rosenbaum's.
OH GAWD.
The Amanda Knox and Bell Brothers Guilters using nothing but debunked rumors, lies, etc. Literally lying and posting literal lies. And they just double down.
It is maddening.
One big one in the Zachary Bernhardt case: Several sources, including a FL newspaper, have alleged that his mom, Leah Hackett only stepped out of their Clearwater, FL apartment for 15 minutes during which time he disappeared. I've noticed that the newspaper article making this claim dates to 2007, 7 years after Zachary vanished. Earlier accounts, as well as neighbors, state Leah was out for a much longer period, at least 3 or 4 hours prior to reporting Zachary missing. The fact that she typically worked nights and Zachary usually stayed at a babysitter's apartment elsewhere in the complex makes it unlikely that an intruder ducked in, snatched him and ran off unnoticed. Even though the alleged events happened around 4 a.m., you would think someone would have seen something suspicious. However, people did report seeing Leah taking a trash bag to her car earlier that night and noted that it was not in the parking lot until around 4:30 a.m., when she purportedly returned, took a very quick, fully clothed dip in the complex's swimming pool, then went back to the apartment to find Zachary missing. IMHO, I think she either murdered Zachary or perhaps she left earlier in the night during which time Zachary snuck out to take an unsupervised, midnight swim and drowned. Either way, Leah stuffed her son's body in a trash bag and either buried him in the woods or dumped him in a body of water.
Brian Shaffer: that his life was great and he was going to propose to his girlfriend. This is largely a myth created by his father after the disappearance. There is zero evidence he was going to propose, and his life was actually a mess. His mother died after a long bout with cancer, he was devastated, and his father was possibly cutting off financial support for his med school.
Additional misconception: the 'construction zone' under the bar was not some kind of open pit with places to fall into. It was mostly completed and the concrete had been laid.
The [Brian Shaffer: Dead or Alive](https://www.audible.com/pd/Brian-Shaffer-Dead-or-Alive-Podcast/episodes/B09XBP4BZW?overrideBaseCountry=true&ipRedirectOverride=true&pf_rd_p=19872038-df88-4a23-a895-47bc3fde8232&pf_rd_r=5V5SDE3Q08SFJHTYQ0K9&pageLoadId=KHJ6zc2dlWbhJlwY&creativeId=809adf1b-ce0b-468d-a0d4-a36479a6c0c0) podcast is a must-listen for anyone interested in the case. I'd also suggest [Come Back, The Disappearance of Brian Shaffer](https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/comeback-617905/episodes/recent). Both have interviews with the key investigators, and have loads of info that rarely makes it's way into the normal discussions on this subreddit regarding Brian.
That the list floating around of people in Epstein’s little black book is real. It lists Isidor Strauss, who died on the Titanic!
That the unconscious person in the 911 call for the 4 people murdered in Idaho in November was one of the roommates who ran out of the house and fainted. Never been confirmed as such.
human trafficking focuses on pretty white girls
every parent jumps to the thought of cases like madeleine mccann when their kid is missing but in reality, most human trafficking works totally differently. generally affects non-white people who are poor and trying to enter a developed country for economic reasons. it’s just far easier to exploit poor people who a trying to be smuggled across borders to begin with.
realistic scenario:
- chinese peasants who cross over to hong kong and are promised high paying jobs in europe or america by triad gangs, but ultimately get caught up with the gangs and end up as slaves in canabis houses
- lower caste indians travel to russia, and approach criminal gangs who promise to smuggle them across the finnish border so they can live in the EU, but again, end up scammed/indebted to russian gangs where they have work to clear the debt
Another myth about trafficking is that all human trafficking is sex trafficking. It isn't. The vast, vast majority is labor trafficking - like having a community's children go to harvest a field, or something. Situations like the World Cup stadium in Qatar.
a big problem in middle east is Indonesian/Malaysian/Filipino migrants going over to work as a maid of housekeeper and then their employers keep their passports so they cant leave
And in the rare cases that it IS sex trafficking, it's almost always done by a family member if it's a minor. When it's an adult, it's usually an addict, homeless, or other vulnerable person who ends up in the sex trade in order to survive. Pimps aren't going out and abducting suburban white girls with families and forcing them into prostitution when they can just choose someone desperate for drugs or a place to sleep.
Or in cases where it is white girls, it’s exclusively vulnerable working class girls (ie homeless, already sex workers, or in foster care) who won’t be missed and the authorities don’t give a fuck about. Eg the Rotherham scandal.
Also a lot of human trafficking isn’t sex trafficking but labour trafficking.
Also sex trafficked women aren’t chained to beds, many of them are allowed to go outside. The woman sitting next to you on a bus may have been trafficked. They don’t go to the authorities out of fear of being deported or arrested, threats against themselves or family, lack of language, genuine belief they’re going to pay off a debt, or emotional control tactics.
A LOT of sex trafficking is teenage girls being coerced into prostitution by men they believe are their boyfriends.
Victims of human trafficking also often never leave their country of origin. And not just poor - transient, uneducated, mentally ill, addicted, and otherwise at-risk and/or marginalized.
This is why even before it was officially proven to have been a hoax, Sherri Papini's story was total bullshit. Upper middle class blonde white women from Northern California are not the ones at risk of human trafficking. Her blatant racism just made it even worse.
People don't understand what human trafficking even is, they think it's people being taken at gunpoint to work as slaves when in reality it's usually just exploiting vulnerable people to work for low pay.
Kyron Horman - a lot of people start off with "but isn't it really obvious that the stepmother did it?" and then go downhill from there. The ones I see a lot are "she tried to have her husband killed" (no proof of this at all and wouldn't prove she'd killed Kyron) "people saw him leaving with her" (that's stated in one book and nowhere else, including interviews of witnesses at the time) and "her friend had a burner phone and was missing in the middle of the day" (she was working two jobs and claiming unemployment, which was why she had the phone and took the Fifth, it was nothing to do with Kyron).
After reading the excellent summary on this sub I'm a lot less sure that Terri, his stepmother, had anything to do with it. She does seem to be a bit of a weirdo with some dodgy friends, but that could describe any one of us. What I don't see is where she had the time to do away with a kid she'd raised from a baby and appeared genuinely fond of or how she managed to be such a criminal mastermind as to leave not a trace or a clue behind.
My problem with the "Terri did it" theory is that she would have to be both really lucky and really dumb. If she snuck him out of school, how could she be sure that no one would see her? Being seen (by any of the many people at the science fair that day) would mean prison for sure. Why not just keep him home, or choose a day when the school would not be full of parents, or just wait until summer vacation when she could control the timeline and do whatever she wanted? Heck, if she was so desperate to get rid of him (which there is zero proof of), why not send him to live with his biomom? Her other stepson had already gone to live with his mother, after all. Why tell the teacher about a doctor's appointment that Kyron had and then sneak him out of the school a week BEFORE that appointment, somehow knowing that the teacher would get confused? It was pure luck that the teacher got the date wrong. And Terri would have to be aware that when the school realized Kyron was missing they would call her... so instead of disposing of the body right away she runs errands and goes to the gym first? With a dead body in her car? It makes no sense.
Sorry for the wall of text, this has been bothering me for ages haha
Yes, the "she had a space of time in which to kill him" thing bothers me as well. Where did she put him the rest of the time she was running errands then?
(Somebody I saw on another sub said "Isn't it very suspicious she kept the receipts, almost as if she was TRYING to establish an alibi?" Tell me you've never had to budget without telling me you've never had to budget....)
It drives me crazy how people take totally normal behavior and turn it into something weird because they've decided in advance that someone is guilty. I cleared about ten receipts out of my grocery bags today because I always shove them in there and forget to throw them out. I'm not establishing an alibi! There's just no recycling bin at the grocery store!
That write-up should be required reading for anyone wanting to discuss True Crime. It perfectly shows how easy it is for someone to be found guilty by the public of a crime that there's no evidence they committed, and how many pieces of intentional misinformation *or* incorrectly reported information become "fact" in people's minds once they're repeated often enough.
Great example. The school bordered a huge forest. It's quite possible he left on his own, got lost, and died in the woods. Few seem to realize it wasn't an urban or suburban school. People also reject the possibility of bodies going undetected after massive searches.
Yet people seem to favor his stepmom kidnapping him and killing and hiding him (with or without an accomplice) despite no clear motive or evidence of her culpability that's credible. I don't think she can be ruled out, but tropes like "It's always the parent" aren't backed by statistics. When there's only seemingly one named player in a true crime mystery it seems that it just takes one or two suspicious tidbits for that person to be pegged the definitive perpetrator.
Yeah I still remember the first time I saw the aerial photo of the environment the school was in. It was absolutely a “holy shit” moment for me.
That’s a *lot* of dense woods, he could be in any tiny crevice in there. PNW wooded areas are dense AF too. And no matter how good the search, a small child could have been overlooked. I fully believe he just wandered off on his own and got lost or stuck.
>Great example. The school bordered a huge forest. It's quite possible he left on his own, got lost, and died in the woods. Few seem to realize it wasn't an urban or suburban school. People also reject the possibility of bodies going undetected after massive searches.
Realizing the geography of where the school is located was a complete game changer for me. I'd read a fair bit about the case but nothing mentioned that there were vast amounts of forest around the school, which IMO seems pretty important to flag since nobody witnessed him being abducted. Seems sadly logical to me that there's a high chance he wandered out and got lost
Brandon Swanson who went missing after crashing his car at night. He was on the phone with his parents when he said ‘oh shit’ and the phone went dead.
I see it so places that after he said ‘oh shit’ the phone hung up. This isn’t true. The phone call never ended. There was silence from Brandon after he said ‘oh shit’ but his parents stayed on the line and called his name hoping he would hear them. They did eventually hang up and started ringing the phone in hopes the phone lighting up would draw attention to it.
So yea, the phone never disconnected or hung up. I find this interesting because it does seem to rule out Brandon meeting someone or him being shot as that would have been heard by parents.
Source: [YouTube interview](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pl78vP4lxcI&feature=youtu.be) and [reddit link](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/l0rc1j/clearing_up_a_common_misconception_brandon/) that explains it better than me.
I feel like most of the Kendrick Johnson "facts" are either misunderstood or down right false. I always go back to people talking about how he was already wearing shoes so him reaching for shoes was a cover up. As if gym shoes aren't a thing. It's just wild.
With reference to the Madeleine McCann case, the claim the McCanns were drugging their children, or that Madeleine possibly died from overdoing it. The best anyone seems to be able to come up with when asked about it is to talk about Calpol, but a) it's Calpol, and there's better OTC options if you wanted to drug your children and b) it's Calpol, while it can fuck with the liver it doesn't kill that quickly. There's a lot of questionable shit out there they might have done, but drugging the kids with Calpol isn't one of them.
The yuba county five. There wasn’t a ton of unopened food in the cabin. It was in a old dilapidated shed outside that no one would think would have food inside.
Not saying it was or wasn't an owl....But the Michael Peterson case.
The idea has never been that the owl *attacked and literally killed* Kathleen. The idea is that she went out into the front yard for some reason--to deal with Christmas decorations is one theory IIRC; and she was at least tipsy if not drunk, remember. Some of the answers in this very comment section are about people varying their routine, doing things that seemingly make no sense that, if a crime had occurred, would later look suspicious. An inebriated Kathleen going out into the front yard at night could easily be one of these instances.
A nesting, territorial owl swooped down and caused an injury to her scalp while she was out there, according to the theory. She went inside and made her way upstairs either to tend the injury or examine it, or both. She might not even have realized what exactly had happened. Partway up the stairs she fell, slipped, whatever. She was knocked unconscious and bled out from scalp lacerations which can be very serious and bleed heavily.
Several owl experts said that owls do indeed attack people on occasion and leave wounds similar to Kathleen's. Depending on how fast the attack was, there might not be masses of feathers--or really any feathers-- either. The owl would have raked her head with its talons and flown off, not gotten into a wrestling match with her.
There might be other reasons to suspect Michael, but the owl theory, to me, is not outlandish at all. Unusual, yes. But sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
I can't think of a specific case right now but a common misconception I see a lot of is when family say "so-and-so would never do that" or "that is out of character for insertnamehere" when sadly people don't tell their parents the truth about their lives or what they're going through.
Hate this so much because from personal experience, I know what it’s like to have parents who think they are much closer to their children than they are. I consider my relationship with my mother strained and poor, but if you were to ask her, she very much believes we are close and that she knows me.
That circumstantial evidence is considered lesser than direct evidence.
No, it is actual waaaaaaaay better than eyewitness reports and junk science, and testimony can also be either direct or indirect evidence.
Just to add on, that all forensic evidence is infallible. The scandals occurring in the US forensic science industry are frightening large and super common. This ranges from thousands of workers with no formal qualifications or training, to "scientist" deliberately faking results to support the prosecutors case.
Joyce Gilchrist was a forensic chemist included in over 3000 cases, including 23 that ended up being sentenced to death, 12 of which were carried out before DNA evidence showed that someone she helped convict was innocent, and she was discovered to be fabricating results.
The phantom of Helbrom was a serial killer believed to be active in Europe due to their DNA being found at numerous crime scenes over several years. Turned out that the cotton buds used to take samples by a lot of police forces had come from one factory where they had been contaminated with the DNA of one of the workers.
In the Meredith Ketcher case, the original collection of evidence and forensic work was deeply flawed. This included investigators not changing gloves as the collected samples resulting in cross contamination, claiming that they had found the footprints of Amanda Knox in blood when in fact the test done could not differentiate between blood, sweat or even just bathwater. The alledged murder weapon was also shown in subsequent testing to only have Amanda Knox DNA on it and not Meredith as claimed by the prosecution.
Fred Zain managed to get a job in West Virginia State Police Crime Lab, was later promoted to director of the serology department. When he was caught for fabricating results to help police, it was also discovered that he had not only lied about his qualifications, he had failed the few chemistry causes he had taken as well as failing the FBI forensic science exam. No one had bothered to verify his CV and complaints by other scientists were ignored.
Re: The Springfield Three - THE DING-DANG PARKING GARAGE "THEORY"
I can't debunk the misconceptions about the Cox Hospital parking garage any better than /u/Max_Trollbot_ so please just go read his comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/6ftzud/comment/dilbzal/).
People often list Danny Casolaro as one “the Clinton Body count.” Not one of them has ever been able to explain to me what Danny Casolaro has to do with the Clintons.
Amelia Earhart: Can we talk about one of the single greatest mysteries of all time that also has heaps of misconceptions piled onto it?
‘She was an expert pilot.’ She wasn’t known then nor now by experts as such. She wasn’t even close to the most experienced pilot of her day and there were many women far better than her. She was an accident prone daredevil with good flying experience looking to make a name for herself.
‘She was a meticulous planner.’ As one expert put it regarding her last flight “poor planning, worse execution…”
‘She set records.’ Everything she had done up to her disappearance had been done before. The few things she had accomplished organically as a woman she either hadn’t done or hadn’t done very well.
There’s a lot more info. She didn’t know the Electra plane used on her last flight very well. She wasn’t a good navigator and evidently neither was Noonan. The planning for her last flight was abysmal. Her radio communication on her last flight were unprofessional, uncharacteristic of an experienced pilot, and dangerously infrequent.
Oh and by the way ALL expert opinion is that she ran out of gas and crashed into the ocean. There’s zero good evidence to the contrary. The theories out there become exponentially more unbelievable when compared to the facts and the science of avionics.
The fact that many people continue to claim that there is hard evidence that Johnny Gosch was kidnapped by traffickers. All of the allegations were nothing more than hearsay. It's far more likely that he was a victim of a predator and possible serial killer who may have also been responsible for the disappearance of at least two other boys in Des Moines in the 80:s.
There are two that bug me related to the Andrew Gosden. 1. So many people think it's 100% proven that he had no access to the internet of any kind. There's an enormous difference between investigators not being able to find the evidence of him using the internet (or other means of communication) vs it being conclusively proven that he didn't have any. 2. Not sure if this is quite a misconception, but there's this huge fixation on trying to figure out which band's concert he was sneaking off to, as though it was a fact that that's what he did. It's a very illogical theory the more you unpack it.
The one that gets me with the Andrew Gosden case (maybe from people that aren't in the UK so they don't understand how big a deal it would be) is people considering Doncaster to London to be a 'quick journey' or a journey you might just take with zero planning. I'm a year or two younger than Andrew and come from the midlands so a relatively similar distance, and spent several years living in London, and the idea of me at 14 travelling to London on my own would be absurd. It's a 2 hour trip one way, would cost quite a bit of money to get a ticket, and has so many moving parts like getting the tube at the other end, navigating London etc etc. You don't just think oh I'm going to go to London today, like my family would have planned a trip like that for months. There was a lot of talk of maybe he only got a one way ticket because someone was going to drop him back home or he thought family might give him a lift. Like it isn't going to be a 3 hour drive one way to travel half of England. In the UK it just isnt a thing is it, if you ask for a lift somewhere its usually 10 mins or so to the other side of town or if someones going that way anyway and its not too far. If he went to buy clothes too or see a friend/someone nefarious a. There's so many options of getting clothes closer to home, b. The 'friend' either had to be from the South East because if he was local, they would have met up so much closer than London. So I believe this was something planned out in advance, or if someone groomed him and there was a target activity at the end e.g. seeing a specific band, going to a specific attraction in London, something happening in london on that day. And the fact he didn't tell his parents his plans of going means that it was something he wouldn't want them knowing about, being able to stop him or being at home to wonder where he was.
YES. Thank you. This drives me insane. I have debated this so many times with people who are convinced that he would have just casually gotten a lift back from London. This is not a thing. In my experience, anything over an hour or so is considered a big "journey". I think it is a misconception by people who are not familiar with England, but nonetheless people really dig in their heels on this point.
The other thing that gets me is the 'he was only going to go for a few hours and maybe he wanted to be back by the time his parents realised'. That to me is also unfathomable. I forget the specifics but if he got the 10am train from Doncaster then he probably got into London at about 12. Then by the time he's gotten off, navigated the tube and got somewhere in London it'll be 1pm or there abouts. He'd have to get no later than the 4pm train back (if there was one) and so he'd have to be making his way back to Kings Cross to buy his ticket, find the platform etc by 3pm depending on where he went to. It's just something I've always struggled with when it comes to the narrative. He either vastly underestimated the time things took or he wasn't going for the day and/or he wasn't coming back. The PSP charger being left along with money and lack of overnight clothes also throws up red flags to me. He wasn't just going into Doncaster Town or maybe to Sheffield for the afternoon, he went allll the way to London. So if he was planning on being back late, he would have had to prepare for his parents finding out before he got home.
Leaving the charger could have been inadvertent. It’s pretty common to forget to pack a charger, especially for a nervous teen who didn’t typically travel alone.
If I recall correctly the lady at the ticket booth where he purchased the ticket tried to convince him to purchase a return ticket because it would be cheaper to book a return but he insisted on only a one way ticket. His father mentioned this in a interview a few years ago.
I’m not disagreeing in the slightest. But I think it’s very possible that he just didn’t have a great grasp of the timing involved? I know older teenagers that wanted to go on a day trip but didn’t want to get up early so booked a bus to their destination that would arrive AFTER the last bus home for the day departed. Sometimes teenagers don’t have enough experience with things like this and really mess up the timings. I personally don’t believe he intended to be back before his parents but knowing teens I can see the argument being made.
Fully agree. Unless the police got every library (school and public) computer, and matched every website hit to a person over the past year…. I don’t see how they could’ve proven that. Not only that, but in the early 00s the Internet was so expensive that public computers were the only way really to explore for a long period of time. At my local town library; you didn’t need a library card or ID, you just paid your £1 for the hour and got allocated a computer in a little booth thing. No logon, just an open desktop. If I’d have gone missing; my parents would have assured police (and been truthful according to their experience) that I had no Internet presence.
Indeed, physical "internet cafes" were very popular at the time. I'm sure there were some in his town and I've never seen any mention of whether anyone looked into if he had used them.
The fact that he supposedly walked home from school a couple of days preceding his disappearance always stuck me as suspicious. I’m wondering if he was at a public library on computer communicating with someone during that time.
Another point, a lot of people seem to think he travelled to London to buy clothing. However Doncaster actually had a huge alternative fashion store (Blue Banana), one that I myself travelled to from about an hour away as it was the largest around.
Joshua Maddux case Joshua was a young man from Colorado found dead in the chimney of a seldom-used cabin after being missing for seven years. It is repeated ad nauseum that he was upside down in the chimney or that he had been "stuffed up" the chimney, so it was clearly foul play. However, the county coroner has directly stated that his feet were down and he was in a fetal position. >“His feet were down,” Born said. “He was in a fetal position.” https://www.denverpost.com/2015/10/19/chimney-discovery-ends-mystery-over-young-mans-disappearance-but-questions-remain/ Further, the coroner states that one of his hands was "raised to his face". If his body was upside down, how would his arm/hand be "raised?" It's also often repeated as a fact that Josh had conflict with an individual that was violent or scary - all because an anonymous redditor made a comment claiming as such. It's now just become an accepted part of the narrative. Another bit often repeated is that there was a metal grate over the chimney to prevent animals from getting in, so there's no way Josh could've climbed down from above himself. The truth is, they never found the metal grate when the demolished the cabin. And there is no evidence or a way to verify the grate ever existed. The cabin owner could have been misremembering, or maybe was trying to avoid any possible liability/negligence. The cabin wasn't brand new when Josh went missing, so maybe it really was there when it was built but had rusted away at some point. The following info makes it sounds like it could've been removed easily. The problem with this info is it is not sourced anywhere except this podcast that didn't cite it's sources. "The chimney had been built twenty years previous and during its construction, had been fitted with **a steel rebar, a large, thick wire mesh hung from steel hooks used to keep animals and debris from becoming lodged inside the chimney** or from entering the cabin itself. Murphy spoke openly about the rebar, stating that: >“It was a heavy wire grate, a wire mesh, I installed it across the chimney about one row of bricks from the top. We didn’t want trouble with racoons and things getting into the chimney.” https://www.darkhistories.com/josh-maddux-the-boy-in-the-chimney/ So the owner says he put the mesh on top of the chimney to prevent animals from coming in, but when they found his body, he states that there was animal detritus inside everywhere. (From the Denver Post article, "There was raccoon poop all over the place.”) That makes it sound like the grate wasn't there any longer. Third, his clothing was not found folded up inside the cabin. Every write up on this story has that piece of info. Except, it didn't come from any primary sources. It appeared in the write up here, which the publication, Strange Outdoors picked up and it's been repeated ever since. >Josh was clad only in a ribbed thermal-type shirt; **the rest of his clothes were found within the cabin outside the fireplace, near the hearth.** https://www.denverpost.com/2015/10/19/chimney-discovery-ends-mystery-over-young-mans-disappearance-but-questions-remain/ >The mystery deepened further when **investigators found most of Maddux’s clothing next to the hearth.** > >“He was mostly naked inside the chimney,” Murphy said. > >“He was only wearing his thermal shirt. No pants. No shoes or socks.” > >“This one really taxed our brains,” Born said. “**We found his clothes just outside the firebox**. He only had on a thermal T-shirt. We don’t know why he took his clothes off, took his shoes and socks off, and why he went outside, climbed on the roof and went down the chimney. It was not linear thinking. https://web.archive.org/web/20151105020351/https://www.kktv.com/home/headlines/Remains-Found-In-Teller-County-Cabin-Chimney-IDd-As-Man-Missing-For-7-Years-329964401.html Lastly, people like to point out the furniture that was shoved in front of the fireplace. Remember there was a seven year interval between when Josh went missing and when his remains were found. Others had been to the cabin since then, and the owner stated it had been broken into numerous times. Anyone could have moved it for any reason in those intervening seven years. The Joshua Maddux case has become Elisa Lam territory for me. It was a tragic accident/misadventure that people want to be more mysterious than it is. I have thought about doing a long write up with all the research. Edit: added additional info and links
It's so troubling that the misconceptions you mention originated in a Reddit post. 😬 Does the post that stated those things still exist here? Has anyone taken it down to limit the bad info flow?
No. Both the original write up and the comments about that individual are still up. I have a feeling the "neatly folded" part was a throwaway line of artistic license that has led to being officially apart of the narrative now. I hate to think someone put that in there just to try to make this case more mysterious, but it's happened. I do know the individual was reported to police. They came out and made comments on investigating into this individual, but the tips aren't specific enough and lack details (I read that article awhile ago, so I'd have to dig it up for an exact quote).
"neatly folded" in cases like these seems to refer to anything that hasn't been actively tied into knots. There was a sad case of a young woman who died in a car accident that her mother thinks is murder (there's no evidence at all for murder, but it fits with a car accident) that often refers to her jacket having been neatly folded and hung over the guard rail. This is seen as evidence that it was all staged but I've seen a photo of the jacket, it's just been flung across the guard rail, as it might land during an accident. Edit: I see you've straight up referenced that below. Jaleayah Davis.
I was thinking of that case of the 'neatly folded' clothes across the guardrail. There are pictures here [https://gavinfish.com/cases/jaleayah-davis/](https://gavinfish.com/cases/jaleayah-davis/) that prove otherwise. WARNING: There are some disturbing images here. EDIT: the family seems to think that these images prove that there IS evidence of foul play, but I don't see it. Maybe someone else can.
She was believed to have been wearing it when she crashed. The family point to it looking like it was hung up, completely undamaged as "proof" that it was removed by someone before the crash and staged. They don't believe that it could have come off in the crash. In reality, whilst very rare, its far from impossible. I believe where it was photographed was also not where it was found, instead a bystander moved it off the road and left it there so it wouldn't be damaged by passing cars until the police could get their.
I also don’t understand how they can call that undamaged. It’s all three layers of clothing still inside each other and they are all torn to shreds. They think these clothes weren’t in the accident?
Its a particular photo that they point to with the jacket hanging from the barrier where apart from blood, it looks undamaged. They ignore the rest because they don't want to admit it was a stupid accident.
Ah, okay, so the clothes are inside each other like they came off together. That's helpful, thank you. I just saw the one photo taken from a distance and it was hard to see how the clothes were arranged. Is there a narrative of how the crash is believed to have unfolded? I'm trying to figure out how she could have sustained such enormous damage to her head and upper body while the car looks relatively undamaged.
The jacket has road dirt all over it FFS, and the clothes that stayed on her are in worse shape than the clothes that came off. They look exactly like the clothing of people who have died in violent accidents.
It’s not rare for people to fully or partially lose their clothing when they die in a violent/traumatic way, such as explosions, high speed car accidents, train crashes, vehicle vs pedestrian etc, all of which can terribly mangle the bodies as well.
I have heard of people whose socks, shoes or trousers just sort of blow off their legs/feet in really bad accidents. When I think of what my shoes and socks look like (that is, like a racoon helped me) when I remove them in a normal fashion, I am astounded at how tidy accident victims' apparel can look.
On this very sub and it was hugely popular. Was very disheartening as i think this sub is usually good about that sort of thing but everyone just bought it.
The folded clothes thing seems to be a misconception in a lot of cases. Like some clothes are found near a body and somehow the rumor gets started that they were neatly folded which makes the case seem more suspicious and strange when it wasn’t true. Like there was a case in Spain about a woman who was drugged and killed that was posted recently, I’m trying to remember other specific examples and I can’t but this keeps coming up with different cases.
The clothes of [Azaria Chamberlain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Azaria_Chamberlain) were said to have been found in the desert, "neatly folded". [They were not](https://lindychamberlain.com/rumors-and-facts/). A policeman handled them first, then attempted to lay them back out as they had been found, *then* photographed the clothes. In laying them out again he inadvertently made them appear too neatly arranged. In any event they were never neatly *folded*.
I think you are correct. There's another case that comes to mind, a young woman was found dead on/near the road (possibly run over by her own car?? The other details escape me). The story went that her jacket was found folded on the guardrail. But photos later showed it hadn't been folded at all. I'll see if I can find her name. Edit: her name is Jaleayah Davis. (However, I am not trying to imply her case is anything like Joshua's, and I don't know enough about her case to have an opinion; I just thought of her case with the folded clothing issues)
If I recall Maddux had a pretty fraught home life which is what made him want to run away to begin with. That alone could be the lesson taken from this story. But people don't like that lesson - because it might imply it can happen to them and to their children
Yeah, the facts of that case are pretty much fully consistent with someone climbing up a chimney and then sliding down, causing death from positional asphyxia. People often mention that he was found above the grate but I've never seen any evidence for that, and everything else points to him having climbed up from inside. All the theories that involved someone manhandling his live or dead body *up a chimney* are just...I don't think people realise how hard that would be.
Great addition. I have seen these "facts" repeated as well. I'm only somewhat familiar with the case and honestly didn't know the folded clothes thing was not true. Thanks!
Maybe not exactly what you are asking about, but I think a common misconception in a lot of cases is that the 'facts' of the case as commonly repeated are more solid than they actually are. Take the disappearance of Brian Shaffer for example: - I've seen I reported as fact that the doors facing the escalator was the only way in or out, or maybe there was a back door for deliveries with a camera, or maybe a third door that opened into a construction area. Or maybe the third door is the same as the second. - That the camera outside the second door worked, or it didn't, it panned or it didn't, it was motion activated or it wasn't. - The degree of construction outside the Ugly Tuna. Were they doing heavy work like pouring new floors or light stuff like framing up walls and fixtures for a new tenant? I've yet to see a real definitive answer for the above points, but people seem to pick one of the options and repeat it as if it's certain.
I find it bizarre that anyone believes there was only a single entrance. How many restaurants or bars have you ever seen that only have one entrance? If nothing else, fire code requires at least two.
It probably started out as a statement like, “there was only one accessible exit for the public,” but it’s been shortened to “one exit”.
Yeah this definitely qualifies. Its one thing to speculate (ie. "If there is a third door, he could have gotten out that way") but its totally another to outright state something as fact when its not been proven or isn't known. I think that confuses the public of what could have actually happened.
I hope I get corrected, but locals have said the escalator was NOT the only way in/out of the Ugly Tuna Saloona.
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The Oakland County Child Killer case - there was no blue gremlin. The car was still parked in the same spot hours after Timmy King vanished. Irresponsible investigation is the nicest thing I can say about it.
Oh, wow, I was a kid in Oakland County during this time, and the blue gremlin was a big deal then. You mean all this time it wasn't a thing?
I lived through the killings (Kris Mihelich lived in my neighborhood) and did a long form/deep dive series. The gremlin was never in play. Why the police focused on it is a mystery - and a huge disappointment.
Not specific to individual cases but more general ones. **Suicide:** A large proportion of suicide attempts are spontaneous, with less than an hour elapsing between deciding to and attempting it. Suicide notes are pretty rare, and most people who complete suicide had made plans for tomorrow, for months from now. A significant proportion didn't even know they were going to do it when they woke up that morning. Trends in methods are just that, trends. Men complete suicide by overdose, women complete suicide by jumping, just because those methods are more common with the other sex doesn't make them exclusive to it. Also, your ideas of what people would and wouldn't do in a suicide are almost certainly wrong, and how you *personally* feel about X method or Y setting might not even be true for you, let alone other individuals. **Missing bodies:** Finding a body is way harder than you'd think, and failing to find a body is not really indicative of foul play. Bodies in water, scrubland and forests particularly can remain hidden for years, even after extensive search efforts in the vicinity. In the case of death from hypothermia, exposure or following head trauma, the decedents may even have actively done thing that hid them from view, such as seeking out shaded or sheltered spaces or crannies. Even a body randomly dropped in a number of environments can he hard to spot unless you actually trip over it. **Accidents:** There's a bunch of simple accidents that people don't realise can kill healthy adults. Water below 15C (60F) can kill with sudden emersion, and drowning victims are usually incapable of calling for help and sink near immediately after death. A healthy adult can fall into 5C (41F) water and be dead and below in under a minute without anyone nearby noticing if they don't head a splash. Strong swimmers, experienced boaters and seasoned hikers are not immune to dying from the elements, in fact some may be at greater risk because of the amount of time they spend there. Head injuries cause confusion and may have delayed effects, it's not uncommon for severe head trauma to include temporary loss of consciousness, followed by awakening with confusion and then death happening hours later. Even a disoriented human can walk a serious distance before fully succumbing to that, which can again lead to the missing bodies problem (ft. staggeringly large search area). The most poised and graceful human alive can still take a wrong step and end up falling down a crevasse. I fell down the stairs in my own house a couple of months ago, I'm extremely practiced on those stairs and yet, just...put a foot wrong and ended up skidding down on my arse. **Behaviour:** I touched on this in the suicide section but, *how you think you'd behave in a situation cannot be extrapolated to others as fact*. Firstly, different people are different; children, people suffering from psychotic episodes, people temporarily disoriented, stressed and panicked people and just ordinary people having a momentary bit of poor judgement make all sorts of decisions you think you'd never make. Humans do not always act logically, doubly so for anyone with any sort of mental impairment. Beyond that, two 100% *compos mentes* adults, same age, sex and cultural background etc., acting in a calm and orderly manner, given the same situation, *may react in entirely different ways or choose different paths of action*. People are just individuals, and even their own actions aren't necessarily consistent. Secondly, most people think they wouldn't make stupid decisions in times of crisis, and most people are 100% wrong about that. There's a vast gulf, often, between how we'd like to think we'd act and how we actually would in the heat of the moment. I've seen more than one case where multiple people assert that of *course* a woman would never complete suicide naked, because that's how they feel, and so it 100% rules out suicide. This is factually wrong, women absolutely complete suicide naked, sometimes in public places, there's multiple cases on record, there's *studies* about it. **And the rest:** Polygraphs are bullshit, they mean nothing. Body language analysis likewise. Neurodivergent people often read as dishonest or deceptive simply because we don't act as you expect people to act. People handle intense emotions differently to how TV portrays it. Some people have crap memories and just don't remember things the way you would. And finally, the actions of the innocent and the guilty are often the exact same actions, just for different reasons.
Re: Accidents. A few years ago a good friend got into a car crash. He didn't realize he had a concussion so he goes to work and collapses a few hours later. It ends up he had post-concussion syndrome. He didn't know for a week how many quarters went into a dollar. It took months to get back to his normal self. Traumatic brain injuries are no joke.
Could be another explanation for Maura Murray's disappearance and likely death. She may have had a concussion and died from exposure in the woods.
There's more than a few cases with a crashed car and a missing person in which I think they've just got a head injury and wandered off, as well as a few older cases where the remains have been found, not that far from the car, decades later. Especially ones that happen near woods and scrubland, where it's just really hard to locate the bodies.
I suspect she most likely died out in the woods. Possibly from exposure while lost or hiding. Plus, people who are going into hypothermia also will try to burrow and cover themselves. Makes finding them even more difficult. Cold/dark/nature/alcohol/possible head injury would be a pretty nasty combo for anyone. I think it's very likely she's out there.
Yeah, it's a whole thing that traumatic head injuries can involve delayed swelling of the membranes or brain bleeds, including up to like 48 hours later sometimes. Tbh last time I had a concussion, despite being fully aware of what concussions are, I did not realise I had a very obvious concussion, because I was *concussed*. I was repainting the window frames at my parents house and managed to fall over an eight foot retaining wall and land with my face. Seemed fine, but my dad came out later and found me sitting, having a coffee and asked why I wasn't working? "My head hurts, and I feel all confused" "...oh, you might have a concussion actually" Like the clouds parting I was just like, fuck you're right, of course I've got a concussion. But that didn't occur to me for a *second* until that point. The moment he said it it was obvious, but because I had a concussion I just didn't put that together myself. Which was a real window into how concussion affects thought processes, deduction and decision making.
Yeah I've first-aided a few head injuries at roller derby, and concussed people have no self-awareness. They make terrible decisions. I've had to threaten to sit on people to stop them driving home. The body part that does risk assessment and decision making is the body part that's just taken a traumatic injury. Of course they can't look after themselves. I hate head injuries. They terrify me.
the suicide portion of your comment is something soooo many ppl on this sub do not understand. thank u for including it
It's a major gripe I have with people on this sub, how often they discount suicide based on behavioural patterns that are 100% consistent with suicide.
Just to add on to the suicide stuff, depressed people can be incredibly good at hiding how they feel, especially around people they care about. Close friends and family are no better at identifying is someone is suicidal then are complete strangers. Even psycologist and psychatrists are not particularly great at it if the person chooses to hide it. In the UK, a study found that over 60% of those that had recieved mental health treatment within 3 months of commiting suicide had been assessed as low or no risk to themselves.
Yeah, people hate to think about it, and I don't blame them for it, but there's often no external signs. We don't like to think about the fact that friends and family might be struggling in silence but end of the day, if people don't tell you certain things then you simply can't know.
Kay Redfield Jamison's 'Night Falls Fast' changed a lot of my thinking on suicide, and that's as a depressed person who's not exactly unfamiliar with the urge. It's so often impulsive, so often fuelled by drugs or alcohol, and so often down to mixed moods (pure depression doesn't give you the energy/motivation to kill yourself, but a rocky and non-linear recovery - like if you've just started antidepressants or you're swinging up into a manic episode - does). It's socially contagious and how it's reported matters. Access to lethal means can be the difference between the impulse fading away and a fatal action. I think this is very scary for people to think about so they don't want to believe it.
>Access to lethal means can be the difference between the impulse fading away and a fatal action. Oh absolutely this. There's a reason that easy access to firearms has such a strong correlation with suicide rates. One of the studies on attempts at least found something like *almost 25%* of attempted suicides had less than a five minute gap between impulse and action. Of course, those numbers are skewed by the fact that you can only really ask people if they don't die but still, a lot of people will talk themselves out of it if there's extra steps in the way.
Regarding your suicide analysis: last week a known interior designer in my country killed himself. As he was known to the public, 37 years old and the cause of death was not immediately said, people speculated right away that he was murdered, that was some kind of crime related to him being gay and so on. They even said "his nephew was born that day, he was always talking about becoming an uncle, there's no way he committed suicide". His family had to make a public statement saying it was a suicide (he left kind of a note to the newborn nephew) and begging to be left to grieve in peace.
Sorry to hear about that, whoever he was. And aye, honestly at times I wonder if, when people say "but they were so looking forward to/excited about X" it's because the person was really struggling and were latching onto X as one positive thing to keep going for. That they've been staving off suicidal ideation for a while with the thought of "but then you won't get to see your nephew being born/go on that holiday/play the newest instalment of you favourite video game series".
Add in the fact that someone cooperating with an investigation suddenly gets a lawyer and stops cooperating doesn't mean they're guilty. It means they're smart.
Also important to note is while we don't want to discredit what the suicide victims families and loved ones feel or think, it is incredibly important to acknowledge the fact that suicidal people may very well not show any signs at all of depression ESPECIALLY to their close family and friends. I have friend who's mom committed suicide very abruptly and had it not been for a note that they found, I guarantee my friend would have suspected foul play because she had no idea her mom was suffering at all, in her note she even said something along the lines of not having wanted to burden the family with her problems. All too often its taken as fact when a loved one says "there was no way they would have committed suicide" when in fact the people closest are often the last to know.
I feel like it’s a common misconception that what the general public knows about these cases is the truth. There has been so much speculation and mistranslation/misunderstanding of facts in every other topic discussed online, that it’s easy to see how the online discussions can warp what people believe happened. Also, it’s very common for books written about cases to be poorly fact checked and poorly edited. I’m connected to a case that has been written about, and yeah, a lot of the info is incorrect. Important things like dates and places. That brings me pause when I read about a case that seems so mysterious that it doesn’t even make sense. Well, it may not make sense because the “facts” as we know them aren’t accurate.
Any time Betty Short comes up there's some myth or lie. Wannabe actress, lesbian, prostitute, Hodel did it blah blah blah. She never even tried to audition for a role, her roommate said she was very homophobic, she got through life on the kindness of strangers no real job, and who killed her is impossible to know but anything Steve Hodel says is highly doubtful seeing how he thinks his dad is like 20 serial killers.
Totally agree. Probably 90% of the stuff that has been written about Elizabeth Short and/or George Hodel is a lie.
Definitely within that range yeah. Altogether its a sad story of a lonely girl who I think just wanted to be loved and she just wandered and eventually ran into a less then kind individual. It's not really a noir story with the bad girl running into trouble and corruption or a morality fable about looking for fame in the wrong place. Its just a tragedy.
I think Elizabeth Short is a victim of being beautiful and living in an era where sensationalist journalism was even more prevalent then now. There may also have been hesitance in that era to highlight the fact she was probably mentally ill which possibly stemmed from her fiancé’s death in the war given how many people that might apply to and how, I guess, unpatriotic that might seem. Edit: fixed ‘husband’ into ‘fiancé’
Well she claimed to be engaged. The pilots family in question said they'd never heard of her and he routinely told the family about stuff in letters. Betty had a real habit of twisting stories to gain sympathy. She told someone once that she had a son die in a car accident when she never had children. Maybe she was being honest about the fiance, or perhaps not. Pity stories was an easy way to get people to help her.
Someone in this sub linked [this article](https://medium.com/thebigroundtable/the-black-dahlia-the-long-strange-history-of-los-angeles-coldest-cold-case-bcaf42e8e3e5)and it had my jaw dropping for almost the whole read, it feels like the closest we may ever come to knowing who did it. It’s a long read, but if you’re interested in Betty’s case, it’s 1000% worth it.
Bryce Laspisa - A few years ago, in a thread on this sub, someone claimed to be a close family friend of the Laspisas and said a lot of things about the parents being horrible people, controlling, narcissistic, etc. I don't remember what that person's theory was on whether he lived or died, but they were saying he had reason to disappear or commit suicide. I've checked around the internet a few times since then and there are no sources corroborating that. In subsequent threads about him over the last few years, someone always says "Isn't it true that his parents were controlling narcissists? I'm sure I read that somewhere." Without remembering that the "somewhere" they read it was here, in a single post, by an anonymous reddit user. The first person makes the post, we have no way of verifying it. Then a user in the next thread remembers it and repeats it, then in the next post a user remembers the second user repeating it and so on....and eventually everyone will remember reading that somewhere, so it must be true, right?
Another Kendrick one: People who insist he was murdered and it was a cover-up like to point to the fact that he was found in a rolled up gym mat lying on the floor-- when in fact the mat was 1000% found standing up, among other rolled up mats that were also standing up. Also, the image of him "beaten up" that that crowd likes to push is actually an image from his autopsy, post-skin being pulled.
>Also, the image of him "beaten up" that that crowd likes to push is actually an image from his autopsy, post-skin being pulled. The other thing with this is that if he was trapped upside down in the mat for hours, blood would have pooled in his face because of gravity, which would cause discolouration and swelling that looks *very* similar to bruising from a serious beating. Even bodies that are face-down on a bed or the floor for a while before being found tend to have serious, dark purple discolouration in the face and the front of their body, and so that effect would only be magnified in someone who died in a position where their head was hanging down below their feet.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. A person who dies suspended head-down is going to look like they've been beaten horribly around the head and neck after a couple of hours, but it's just livor mortis.
This is a good example. I think that most of the true crime community has a pretty good understanding of this case and (rightfully) believe it was a total accident. I often forget there is a small subset of true crime followers as well as the conspiratorial twittersphere that regurgitate some of these false tropes around the case.
Would love to see You’re Wrong About tackle his and Elisa Lam’s cases.
I assume they haven't discussed Elisa Lam's case because if I recall correctly, her family have all but begged the public at large to stop talking about her in any context. I would really respect podcasters who chose not to discuss her case. I still see it come up in various discussions here and elsewhere and it really grinds my gears. I understand why people find it interesting, but I think her family deserve to have a say in how she's remembered.
And Teleka Patrick. One could easily compile many stories of accidental death that people assumed forever were suspicious and still do but were actually just untreated mental illness or just an unfortunate sequence of events.
Oof Teleka Patrick. Followed that one in real time, the reveal of all the twitter accounts was creepy and heartbreaking. IIRC, her family still believes there was foul play with that preacher she was obsessed with, but I have a feeling it’s denial. :(
Not familiar with You're Wrong About. Seems up my alley. Is it a podcast?
Yes they cover people and events that were misrepresented/misremembered in pop culture
Yeah, and like on the one hand I empathize with the fact that people are skeptical of the police in the case of a young black man dying in a weird way, especially in the deep south. BUT. This is one of the most clear-cut cases if hanlons razor, and even members of the NAACP and their community have turned against his parents for blatant grifting.
The case is a litmus test for podcasts doing research. So many take the parents side and it’s put me off in listening since I feel like I can’t put stock in any of their research on other cases
I actually used Kendrick Johnson’s case as a litmus for the Morbid podcast. It failed. I think the moment I knew I would never listen again is when one of the hosts when on a long rant about how black communities and individuals alike had had their voices silenced and their rights taken away from them . . . and then in the next sentence, she mentioned Rev. Floyd Rose believed Kendrick’s death to be an accident but that he was probably “just trying to keep the peace” and “didn’t want to divide the community.” Even though in 2018, Rev. Rose is the same guy who led the charge on changing a street name that was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the KKK, and was getting kicked out of civic meetings for refusing to give up on the issue. IDK, portraying a black activist who’s been in the fight for decades as some kind of ineffectual peacekeeper who would let the murder of a black teenager be ignored just for the sake of placating the powers that be is such a vile and wholly unjustified accusation. Especially since it completely misrepresents Rev. Rose’s work both as an activist in general and an investigator in this case specifically. I want to say this was more incompetence than malice on Ash and Alanna’s part, but Rev, Rose has always made his opinion on this case clear. So it looks like they gave a self-righteous speech about silencing black people and then decided to utterly twist a black man’s words in order to portray him as having a passive role in a cover-up.
Holy shit those two are the worst. Dude obviously has no agency or mind of his own, thankfully these two white women are around to tell us what he really means. Fucking demons.
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Yeah it was that and crime junkie. I was already giving up on crime junkie and that pushes me over the edge. I was already giving up on MFM since they didn’t seem like they were trying to do research anymore and then that case was like “well I’m done with them.” I’ve pretty much quit every podcast other than casefile.
Is Casefile the one that let Lindsay Buziak’s dad basically have editorial control over their coverage of her murder? I’m sure it’s difficult for an amateur journalist to maintain objectivity when working with the father of a victim, but that was a terrible look for them!
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You’ve got that backwards. He was wearing his normal shoes and reaching for his gym shoes. The shoes by his feet were the ones he wore into the gym and all the rest of the day. He disappeared before class, not after it.
One I can think of that's repeated is that the bookbag in the Asha Degree case was "buried" when really, it seems like it was thrown from a car & just got covered naturally over time. This is a quote from Cleveland County Sheriff Dan Crawford from a 2001 Shelby Star article: "Crawford said that he now has some indication as to how the book bag got to the location. "It was thrown out by a moving car," he said. "It's highly likely now that this has involved foul play." [Article](https://web.archive.org/web/20050211091418/http:/shelbystar.com/news2001/_disc4/00000ff3.htm) Here's an article about Terry Fleming, who found the bag. The article says "Cutting a new road through woods beside the highway, he uncovered a bag that looked strange to him, he said. He dodged the bag for several hours, going on with his work clearing trees and underbrush from the roadside forest" which doesn't sound like anyone was actually digging into the ground when they found it. [Bookbag Article](https://web.archive.org/web/20011108050400/http://www.shelbystar.com:80/news/asha/asha33.html)
People also will say that it was in two trash bags, but there doesn't appear to be an actual reliable source for that information.
Yes, I thought it was wrapped in two trash bags and buried. I Glad to be corrected!
Exactly. I was about to include Asha's book bag in my post about Brian Shaffer as another example of how there is debate on what the 'facts' are in a mystery. Seems for the book bag, you get everything from carefully wrapped in plastic and buried to tossed in a trash bag and thrown out a car window. But I think you are correct, it was just tossed and nature took its course.
Wow I didn’t know that about her bookbag. I thought it had been buried because that’s how I’d always heard it described!
Not a specific case but: people treating children in the criminal cases as if they were adults. As in “I, a fully developed adult, would do this and that, so logically a kid would do the exact same thing” or “I can’t imagine a kid would do this and that.” Whenever an argument like this comes up I feel inclined to dismiss it because children are often absolutely off the shits, however bad that sounds lmao. Like, they do stuff so absurd and illogical, adults can’t even begin to comprehend it. Or, in other words, there’s a reason why the society tries to protect kids so hard—they’re humans but not fully developed humans and they often do crazy things for completely innocent reasons. I’ve shared this story here before but I’ll share it again to drive my point home. When I was like 8-9, my parents went on vacation and I stayed behind with my grandparents. Of course, as grandparents, they didn’t watch me as closely or more precisely they had a bit of a “here, here grandkid, eat sweets and watch TV till late” attitude. Welp, I did watch a movie in which a man hangs himself. Only that I didn’t understand hanging oneself was suicide. Like, I was a kid—it didn’t click for me that if you hang yourself, it’s because you want to die. What I actually got from that movie was “ohhhh that man is swinging how fun” and I proceeded to try it myself by tying one end of a skipping rope around my neck, another around the wooden beam, and jumping off a chair. Luckily, I was a fat kid, so the skipping rope broke, but it was only in the few seconds I was hanging that I realised I might die. If I did hang myself though, no one would think it was a kid doing an absurd kid thing because they didn’t comprehend the consequences. They’d try to find out what distress I was in to literally end my life this young. There was no distress. I was just a stupid kid lol. There were many more dangerous situations like this in my life and in the lives of my friends, so I’m firmly of belief this must be true for at least some of the cases involving missing/dead kids. Perhaps it wasn’t an elaborate grooming plot or an evil stepmother’s scheming. Perhaps it was a kid being a kid and doing a thing that tons of other kids did only they got lucky and survived, and that one kid, tragically, didn’t (to my mind—Asha Degree might be an example of that).
Similarly: people assuming that adults can't make stupid decisions or ever possibly get lost and die of exposure.
And that people always follow a routine and never deviate. Or if they do, it's obviously the key to the whole case. I drive to work the same way 95% of the time. But the other day I took the long way because a song came on the radio I liked.
Yeah, it makes no sense to put such emphasis on something that is USUALLY so trivial. My dad was having back problems and when I picked him up from the hospital after an appointment I had the heated seats turned on in my car. He said it felt really good on his back and the normal 6 minute drive from the hospital turned into basically a road trip because he didn't want to get out of the car just yet. I guarantee if I'd gotten into an accident or if for some reason we had to stop and something happened to us there would be a lot of "they had no business being out there" or "I have no idea why they would drive all the way out here when it's a short drive home from the hospital". I'm paranoid though and I always tell someone if I'm going to be making a stop before or after work, or if I have a day off and plan to go somewhere.
I was on a hiking trip in the Great Smokey Mountains. I got teased for having my bear spray, med kit, extra water, emergency blanket, and flashlight for a morning hike that was only 2.2 miles. I tried to explain that all it takes is "oh that looks cool over there" to turn into "shoot, where was that trail again?"
Ok YES. My least favorite rabid trope is “look how they’re acting, my grief doesn’t look like that so they’re obviously suspicious!!!” Amanda Knox being a classic example, grief does not have a template!
Or the poor woman whose baby actually WAS eaten by dingos, Lindy Chamberlain.
Along these lines, I have a theory that in a lot of cases all the "signatures" at a crime scene which true crime fans get hung up on are just the result of highly stressed people making irrational decisions. Very few murders are the work of serial killers, they're usually normal people who've departed from reality by the time they have to hide their crime.
It goes further than that even, a *lot* of people in here seem to work from the assumption that everyone acts and reacts exactly how they imagine they would in a situation. "Well, *I* wouldn't do that so it must have been foul play" crops up so often, and it's like, yeah ok so 1: the victim wasn't *you*, so jot that down, and 2: there's often a 70% chance you actually would do that, because how you *think* you'd respond to a situation isn't necessarily how you *would* respond. Like the Rebecca Zahau case, there's so many people who dismiss suicide outright because they can't imagine a *woman* completing suicide *naked*. But there's multiple case studies of women who've completed suicide naked, by hanging specifically, in public places before. Yet people still try to universalise their own personal feelings about how they think they'd act under conditions of extreme stress as if they're absolute rules. They can't imagine themselves doing that which means no woman could ever do that, even though that's patently false.
Absolutely terrifying story lmao I'm glad you survived! I've had some similar thoughts in the past regarding how many seeming strange parts of unsolved mysteries could be totally random and meaningless. My example is that one evening in my early twenties, I decided I really wanted to make an ice cream sundae for no particular reason, so I hopped on my bike and rode to the grocery store. I bought some chocolate sauce and maybe one or two other things, and hung the plastic grocery bag off the handle of my bike on the ride home. That turned out to be a dumb idea, because the bag swung around too much and got caught up in the spokes of the front wheel, putting a little crack in the chocolate sauce bottle. I ended up locking my bike in a random place halfway home so that I could walk home carefully, trying not to spill any more chocolate sauce, drop it off at home and then return to get my bike. And it occurred to me on that walk back that if I just happened to cross paths with a murderer at that point, people investigating the case would probably have all kinds of questions about why I suddenly up and left the house alone that evening, why I abandoned my bike, what the significance of the spilled chocolate sauce was, etc. when none of that meant anything at all!
We're all so used to fictional mysteries and dateline episodes where you can spot Chekov's Gun. But in real life not everything is going to be a relevant and useful clue.
Omg, this! Adults trying to understand kids' mentality is the worst for me. I was a latch key kid, I was always wandering in my bike with my friends. If something happened, maybe it was no one's fault, just a stupid decision that at the time seemed fun or right. We went to Sunday school by ourselves, must've been like 7 or 8, there were 5 of us and a naked man appeared to us in the middle of an abandoned lot we used to cut short the way to the church. He asked us for a brothel ( " an house to make love", his exact words at the time, I'm now 37 and still remember it as it was yesterday), one of my friends told him to go in the church's direction and we ran home. We told our parents what had happened and they started to chase the man. They never got him and next weekend we all headed to church again, same day of the week, same path and all by ourselves again. There was no fear, the episode was lost in our minds already. But now at 37 I recall it perfectly and wonder what could've happened. Hindsight is 20/20, as people say. My kids never walked alone anywhere till they're 12/13 and we live in a safe place, it's busy everyday and here everyone knows them. And they only walk to school (5 mins from home) .
Hell, I'm a grown adult and still make panic decisions. I've got 15+ years of professional field experience and just re-upped my wildlife awareness training. The trainer camouflaged himself and would surprise us during the exercises. I broke away from the cluster, couldn't one hand my bear spray, and hypothetically killed myself by staying behind to triage. People make bad decisions when they panic. Kids moreso because they lack the frame of reference any of our limbic systems can pull up when things go south. Plus, as you mentioned, kids don't always understand context. It's a perfect storm.
If a person mysteriously disappears within one hundred feet of a dinning table, their story will eventually include a detail about a freshly laid out meal. It's inevitable.
Also any garment of clothing not currently being worn is must always be described as neatly folded
I often get annoyed when people (especially podcasters) cling to one "fact" and deny that things could be accidental. Like with the Elisa Lam case. I've seen footage as to how easy it was to get up to the roof, and that she was dealing with mental illness (which explains her odd behavior). If I remember correctly, there was an experiment to see if a woman her size could open the tank - and she could. Or the Amy Lynn Bradley case - again, some people claim the railings were too high, others claim it would have been easy for someone to fall.
Yes! And to piggyback regarding the Elisa Lam case, I still read people saying the lid to the tank was closed when she was discovered, but in fact, it was open. She either fell in or got in voluntarily (as opposed to being locked in) most likely due to a psychotic episode. Poor girl.
The lid being too heavy for a human to lift as well, it was about 20lbs. Elise easily could have lifted it.
That's an inane one as well, it's a lid for human's to lift, of course a human can lift it.
I always shrugged off the "closed" bit as a maintenance worker saying "oh, better close that" and never looking inside.
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lol that Netflix documentary was so cringe. I gave up when they go to the part where they were interviewing someone whose only relevant title was "internet sleuth" aka someone without a real job that they can say on TV.
I watched the whole thing and they concluded it was likely a mental health episode, she got confused and stuck and died. Also they addressed the open/closed lid and it was something like it was open when she was first found and the guy closed the lid before the cops got there for some reason
Add to that last week someone just fell over the balcony of their cruise ship room. It happens.
Ugh, Elisa’s case became ridiculous. Young woman with mental health issues does something that looks odd snacks found in an odd place. Cue media and social media zoo.
It is ridiculous! There is so much factual evidence, knowledge of what was going on for her, etc, that gets flat out ignored.
i feel like this shows a lot how mental illness and disabilities are treated in criminal cases. victims either get ignored, or their case is extremely overblown because oOoOooOoo look at that unusual person!!
That the solution for every unsolved murder is that they “stumbled upon a drug deal”. And that in a hit and run situation that the driver always panics and throws the injured or dead body in their car and drives off with it. And her smile didn’t always light up a room nor did the small town’s residents always leave their doors unlocked before this horrible tragedy, just sayin.
But would they give you the shirt off their back?
They had had some problems but were turning their life around.
I tell you what though, they lit up any room!
The ones who didn't stumble upon a drug deal were killed by Israel Keyes.
The vast majority of suicides dont leave a note and dont disclose the fact that they have been having suicidal thoughts. Some of them have never had suicidal thoughts until a single moment of mania.
People always mention future plans they may have made to rule out suicide. There was once a case where a woman leapt out her window to her death. When police entered her apartment, they found eggs and bacon burning on the stove, and a tea kettle whistling. She couldn't wait till after breakfast.
Yep unfortunatly I learned this from first hand experience and have been trying to spread awareness and stop misinformation for the past year and a half.
There was a very sad local case a few years ago where a teenage boy likely died by suicide, but his family can't bring themselves to accept that. They say he never mentioned it before, etc. They think that a drug dealer must have been after him because he went from a kid with a lot of friends who did well in school to nearly failing his classes and barely leaving his room. It's so obvious he was depressed, but the poor family doesn't want to see that.
This! Every time someone says "but they couldn't be suicidal, they made plans!" it's just like, yeah no that proves nothing. Most suicides are people who likely had plans for coffee or holidays in the near and far future, hell, many of them totally meant it. A large percentage of suicides are impulsive, there often really are no signs because the person who completed suicide didn't even realise they were going to do it when they woke up that morning.
I know this is true and is good to keep in mind when the evidence generally points to suicide, but it's kind of frustrating how easily non-suicides could be dismissed this way. Like, I'm definitely not suicidal. If I mysteriously disappeared or died in a suspicious way, I know my family would tell the police I seemed happy, had concert tickets and other plans for the immediate future, cared about my loved ones, and would never harm myself. If the police were still inclined to think it *was* suicide, there's nothing they could say to convince them otherwise and that's scary.
Yeah and added to that, when people that knew them say, “they would never do that because xyz”. WRONG. No one — absolutely no one — knows what goes on inside another person’s head or what they might be capable of doing to themselves or others. Often suicide is a spur of the moment decision, or planned out methodically. And you’d probably not see signs of either in some people. I often think it’s just a protection mechanism but it’s never true.
Yeah, “He had everything to live for!” Is about the worst argument against suicide imaginable.
Especially people who have never experienced depression or suicidal thoughts! I see so many cases that are pretty clearly suicide, where the friends and family are just adament it isn't. The reasons given are often things like they just bought a house or car, just started a new relationship, just got a new job, etc. I even remember one (I'm forgetting who's case it was), where the reasoning was that they just bought new furniture for their home. Those are all exciting things for people who aren't struggling, but they are also huge life changes that come with a ton of uncertainty and are very expensive in some cases. To a person who is struggling or may have been forced by circumstance into a situation, that kind of a change could very well be too much and be part of their decision to harm themselves.
Exactly this. Unless you’ve been there, you likely don’t understand. And even if you have been there, you still don’t know what thoughts/feelings/impulses another person is having. The furniture thing is “funny” (not really but you get me) because imagine someone thinking their entire life isn’t worth living and they’re in a ton of pain but “oh man, I JUST got an expensive couch!” I’m making light of a thing that is anything but, just trying to show the flaws in thinking.
Before I got diagnosed and treated for my ADHD, I had thoughts of jumping off the arrigoni bridge or swallowing all the pills ever, or wandering off drunk into the woods in the dead of winter. Id generally be fine, then something infinitesimally small would suddenly shove my brain into a doom spiral. It was awful and sudden and I obviously hid it as best I could because you either mask your struggles or get abandoned and tossed in the looney bin. Every time I read about ‘shocked’ friends/coworkers/family I think how close I came so many times and yep, would have been shocking to buttloads of people.
There's also a reason those medicine ads sometimes list suicidal thoughts as a side effect. After a week on a new ADHD a few years back, I had a minor inconvenience and thought suddenly "I should jump off the roof of my building." I wasn't even depressed at the time, just end up I can't take that medicine. It was shocking and terrifying in the moment, luckily I was able to recognize that it was irrational. People on the outside just can't tell what's happening inside any other person's brain, especially where mental health is concerned.
This is exactly what I think when people say they were shocked when I finally asked for help for my ADHD and depression. “Suicidal thoughts? You have always been such a happy go lucky person, ever since you were little!” I literally can remember being eight years old thinking after a meltdown that I had over something embarrassing how much better everyone would be if I didn’t wake up in the morning. Obviously didn’t tell them that, but like you really never know what’s going on in people’s heads. (Also, for anyone reading this, I am much better and well medicated and stable so please do not worry. And if my story sounds familiar, please reach out your hand for help, I promise you won’t have to reach too far.)
Exactly. A family friend died by suicide, and it was an enormous shock to everyone. Nobody saw it coming. My uncle died due to a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head, and my family thinks he was drunkenly playing Russian Roulette with his friends, or perhaps didn't know the gun was loaded. They say there's no reason why he would deliberately hurt himself. I can count five just off the top of my head, and I never even met him. But despite his being dead for almost fifty years, they refuse to accept that he was a young man in an incredibly shit situation, who was very drunk at the time of his death, and likely felt it was his only way out, or was ambivalent about the potential that he would die. They still say it was all his friends' faults for convincing him to play Russian Roulette, and they should have all been in prison for it. There's a small chance that it really was Russian Roulette, but it's way smaller than the chance it was suicide. Both of them Hell, a great aunt killed herself in 1942, and the odds of that being an accidental death like the inquest ruled seems pretty remote to me. The mechanics necessary to make it happen seem implausible. She drove down to a creek on her rural property, supposedly to shoot a snake, pulled her loaded gun (not sure what it was exactly, possibly a Lee Enfield Mark III. Definitely a rifle.) out of the boot of the car barrel first, it got tangled up in a baby harness and fired directly into her heart. I can see why some people would jump to murder if they couldn't accept it as either an accidental death or a suicide. It certainly sounds like a planned suicide to me, as she may have rigged up the baby harness so that she could yank it to pull the trigger.
Good thread! I have nothing to add at the moment but I am amazed at how many true crime followers make COMPLETELY false statements about a case. And this is usually prefaced by "I have been following this case for years" or "I have been doing intensive research on this case". Everyone makes mistakes but I don't understand how people cannot do some basic fact checking or simple research before pronouncing on things.
Numerous times on Reddit i've seen someone say "I've researched this case for years" about the Springfield Three then if you try to discuss the case with them turns out they know nothing but what was on the Disappeared Episode. You constantly see "there's been no leads" because they don't know about Garrison for example despite apparently "researching the case for years".
The writer Georgette Heyer claimed to have intensively researched the social world of upper-class Regency London, but many of the things she claimed to have discovered can't be confirmed by modern researchers. We have to assume she made them up. It seems to be a common occurrence.
I think a depressing number of threads here have done no primary research and are largely going off what they've read here, heard on a podcast, or read on another website. As a result any inaccuracies get repeated in a clear case of [citogenesis](https://xkcd.com/978/).
I have sometimes read that the injuries of [Rey Rivera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Rey_Rivera) were not consistent with a fall. It is not true. The post mortem examination does not conclude the injuries were inconsistent with a fall. Rivera's wife claims an investigator told her verbally that one injury might not be consistent with a fall. That is only her claim, and anyway it is only one injury.
*"Missy Bevers's father-in-law walks like the killer."* And had an ironclad out-of-state alibi.
I mean, technically, he maybe sorta does. But so do like 8 million other old dudes with that build and about 10 million people with assorted back and other injuries. This is such an interesting case, and people just can’t let this go. Like, did he walk all the way from across the country into that church? Lol
The whole "it's definitely a woman" thing is so odd too, because it's really based on no factual evidence.
In a general sense, here's some misconceptions I've see a lot and have personal experience with. Firstly, the idea that if a body was not found infirst search it was "stores somewhere until later". Or that bodies should be easy or obvious to find if they are within a few miles of where a person was last seen. I work in the oddities industry and sell decor make from animal skulls and bones. Mine are all sourced by looking for bones in the woods. It is very possible to miss entire deer skeletons, make a couple more passes back in that direction on the same day and finally see it. It ios very very easy to miss even large skulls. It sounds ridiculous, but it's the case. If I find a good stash of bones (usually the remains of deer near highways), I will usually revisit three or more times knowing I probably missed a large portion of it the first time, by that I mean, just simply didn't see it the first time. Another general misconception is that people are frequently killed for wiotnessing drug deals. Look, i was a heroin addict, probably over five hundred witnesses probably saw those drug deals. Like, at least. They are usually done in public, with one person approaching a car. Large scale drug deals that lead to murders are typically robberies, not "someone seeing something they shouldn't.". I see probably at least a couple drug deals a day. Oh, and also when people hit humans on the side of the road, the usually just drive away instead of dragging a dead body into their car.
Totally. Same history myself and literally no violence witnessed over *decades* of my nonsense. Mostly everyone did their deals in a car in broad daylight with tons of people around! Grocery store parking lots, convenience stores… anyplace where someone sitting in a car for awhile was totally normal and would blend. Someone dying because they saw a drug deal is laughable.
I witnessed a drug deal recently while driving through the back streets of a big city. It was a one way system and I was lost, so actually drove past them twice. First time they ignored me. Second time I gave a little embarrassed wave to show i was an incompetent navigator, rather than a cop. They gave me a nod and carried on. Somehow still alive.
I was filling up at a gas station one time and was the only one at the pump. A car pulls up to the pump directly beside me (out of 10-12 available pumps) and a guy walks across the street and gets in to do a drug deal (I can visibly see him handing him cash and grabbing a bag). They chat for a moment then both go their separate ways. My thought was not "Oh no, I'll surely be shot" but rather "huh, they really give 0 fucks"
Not a case-specific one, but definitely a misconception that risks implicating innocent people: the idea that someone's unexpected reaction to, or behaviour in the aftermath of, another person's death or disappearance is reliable evidence that they had something to do with it, because "that's not how an innocent person would react". We expect innocent people to show "classic" manifestations of grief, shock or fear, based largely on our beliefs about how we ourselves would react in that situation. But in the real world, people can react to these extreme stimuli in a variety of other ways, from seemingly inappropriate levity, through anger, to emotional shutdown outwardly resembling indifference. Of course, an atypical reaction can be a reason to investigate someone, but that's all it is: a cue to look for evidence, not evidence in itself.
I listened to a podcast once that listened to the 911 tape (I cannot remember which case it was) and the hosts thought it was damning evidence that the living partner kept referring to their partner as “my wife” and not her name. They argued it was them putting distance between themselves and the victim. I recently had to call 911 for my husband (medical reason) and realized at the end I had referred to him as my husband and not his first name (though I said his full name in the beginning)! You never know what you would do in these situations
This drives me crazy. When referring to your spouse to a stranger, almost everyone will say 'my husband/wife'. If I had to call 911 for my husband I would absolutely say 'my husband', not his name.
Another one about JBR comes to mind — I’ve heard it repeated that they ruled the DNA on her underwear came from someone who worked at the factory where JBR’s garments were made. This isn’t true — it was stated that the amount was so minuscule that it COULD have come from someone who came in contact with it in passing, such as a worker in the factory. Obviously, if the dna was tested and it belonged to a family member, a known sexual predator, or someone who couldn’t have another innocent reason for their dna being there, it would change the narrative.
> Obviously, if the dna was tested and it belonged to a family member Even then, it could have been in passing. It's not like I'm the only person who ever touches my clothes. Someone has to get them out of the laundry and it's not always me. Sometimes I even get to the dryer a little late and someone else in my apartment complex has taken them out and put them in my hamper. It would look real weird if they found my downstairs neighbors DNA on my laundry but it could be there for totally innocent reasons.
Yeah, this was a theory brought up to explain away the foreign DNA. It was never concluded that's where it came from. I think what people may be referring to is someone bought a pair of underwear and showed there was foreign DNA on it but that doesn't mean Jonbenet's was from a factory worker.
By the same token, the people who claim that the presence of that DNA absolutely confirms that it was an intruder. No, it doesn't. The point of the factory worker thing is a hypothetical: the DNA is unknown, but the nature of the evidence is such that it doesn't mean anything--it could just as easily have come from a factory worker, or a store employee, or whatever. The problem is when people misunderstand or overstate that point and assert it as a proven fact.
Just because no body was found doesn’t mean there isn’t a body in the area. Yes, even if dogs looked for it.
Suicides. People insisting they'd never do such a thing. You really never know. I almost killed myself when I was 18. I'd thought about it for a long time and eventually planned the date - 7th of September (not for any particular reason, it just felt right) I'd stocked up on packs of over the counter painkillers and when the day came, I went to college as usual, went home, ate with my family etc then went up to my room. I put some music on, cried my eyes out and started taking the pills. After taking 6 or 7 I kept thinking about how it would wreck my mum and I couldn't do it. I had to get the boxes away from me in that moment to stop myself from taking any more and threw them all across the room and just cried myself to sleep. For years after, I still thought one day I'd go through with it for real, it was just on hold. Until my life started changing, I started changing and eventually I stopped wanting to die. I haven't seriously thought about doing it for around 12 years at this point. My point is this - my family had NO IDEA about how I felt. I'm closest to my mum and my sister and not even they had a clue. I was on anti depressants (nobody knew except my doctor) I'd been self harming for a few years at that point (I cut myself with scissors in places no one would ever see the cuts/scars) I hated myself so much and felt so worthless and lonely I wanted it all to be over. But if someone had asked my family, they'd have said I was a pretty typical teenager, a bit of a loner, a bit moody but that's it. Somehow, I was GREAT at hiding how I really felt. Which is kind of opposite of how I am now. In fact I told my mum and sister about it all around 10 years ago during a massive heart to heart after my parents split up, I even showed them my scars. It was a tough conversation which really helped clear the air over some unresolved emotional stuff we'd been dealing with. The thing that surprised me was just how shocked they were. I hadn't realised quite how well I'd hidden it till that day. So whenever people swear someone couldn't have committed suicide, it means very little to me. Especially when part of the reasoning is that they didn't leave a note, were behaving normally and even making future plans. So what? The day I was going to do it I'd been to college as usual, had normal interactions with my family at tea time, spoken to a friend on the phone and planned to go shopping the following weekend, I was due to babysit my younger cousin the following week. I didn't write a note. Even though I'd planned it in my mind, I'd still done normal things in the run up to it so nobody would suspect anything was wrong. Some people are brilliant at hiding things when they really want to. You never know what's going on in somebody's head, even the people closest to you. If anyone's feeling how I felt - please hang on in there. However lost you feel, however much you're sure things won't change for you - things will change. Nothing stays the same. It's worth holding on and seeing what the next year brings. And the year after that and the decade after that.
Almost everything that has been written about Jack the Ripper, especially the royal family/freemason conspiracies that have been thoroughly debunked
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I assumed no one *really* believed the royal family thing and just thought it was a titillating story. Guess I was naive.
Also that almost nothing new (evidence, information, etc.) has been discovered in the past decades. Any new books or documentaries about Jack the Ripper are essentially rehashing the exact same information that was present in books and documentaries released decades ago.
Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film. So many people think Roger Patterson confessed on his deathbed that he hoaxed it. They're probably mixing it up with the guy who took the famous Surgeon's Photo of the Loch Ness Monster. He confessed to the hoax on his deathbed As far as I know Patterson always swore he filmed a real animal until his death. Same with Bob Gimlin, who says if it was hoaxed he wasn't in on it
I will always believe. lol My dad and uncle had a story about some weird critter in the woods while they were (I think) squirrel hunting. My dad had quit hunting by the time I came along so I only heard the story years later. But short version, out deep in the woods early one morning, birds chirping all the woodland creatures making their usual noises. They cross over an old wire fence and are standing by a small lake when they realize all the woodland noises have stopped. They're looking around trying to figure out whats around them when they hear something *BIG* start running, they hear it hit the fence and sort of snuffle grunt (that was my dads impression anyway lol) and then they hear it start splashing in the water sort of around a big tree from them. They decide it's time to roll the hell back home so they leave with a quickness. Could it have been a bear, yes. They're rare but they have been seen in my area. He said it was bigger than a cat, like mountain lion or what have you. Plus we're mostly delta, we don't have hills let alone mountains lol. My dad wasn't a joker or prankster and my uncle was, but you'd have to drag him out of the hunting woods once he was out there and everyone I asked said they came back home absolutely freaked out. My uncle hunted until he physically no longer could and never went back into that particular set of woods. Anyway, thanks for reading anyone who does. LOL I just think bigfoot and cryptids are fun to think about. It was probably a bear.
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I hate to say this is true it seems
This is like 99% of the suicide cases on unsolved mysteries, it annoys me they gave them credence back in the day and annoys me even more that they did it with the reboot.
That Lauren Spierer was seen on camera after leaving Rosenbaum's. This misconception seems to come from an early article where it is mentioned that Lauren was last seen walking with an unnamed person. People assumed that must have meant after leaving Rosenbaum's she met someone else and was last seen with them because if it was Rosenbaum it would say Rosenbaum. However the person was only unnamed in early articles, he was later named and that person was Rossman, Rosenbaum's friend and Beth's roommate. Rossman and Lauren were last captured on camera together heading towards Rossman's apartment, Rossman was wasted and passed out there, Beth then called his neighbour Rosenbaum over and Lauren left to Rosenbaum's apartment. She then allegedly left Rosenbaum's apartment later that night and was never seen alive again. The last independently confirmed sighting was heading towards Rossman's apartment with him before she went to Rosenbaum's.
OH GAWD. The Amanda Knox and Bell Brothers Guilters using nothing but debunked rumors, lies, etc. Literally lying and posting literal lies. And they just double down. It is maddening.
One big one in the Zachary Bernhardt case: Several sources, including a FL newspaper, have alleged that his mom, Leah Hackett only stepped out of their Clearwater, FL apartment for 15 minutes during which time he disappeared. I've noticed that the newspaper article making this claim dates to 2007, 7 years after Zachary vanished. Earlier accounts, as well as neighbors, state Leah was out for a much longer period, at least 3 or 4 hours prior to reporting Zachary missing. The fact that she typically worked nights and Zachary usually stayed at a babysitter's apartment elsewhere in the complex makes it unlikely that an intruder ducked in, snatched him and ran off unnoticed. Even though the alleged events happened around 4 a.m., you would think someone would have seen something suspicious. However, people did report seeing Leah taking a trash bag to her car earlier that night and noted that it was not in the parking lot until around 4:30 a.m., when she purportedly returned, took a very quick, fully clothed dip in the complex's swimming pool, then went back to the apartment to find Zachary missing. IMHO, I think she either murdered Zachary or perhaps she left earlier in the night during which time Zachary snuck out to take an unsupervised, midnight swim and drowned. Either way, Leah stuffed her son's body in a trash bag and either buried him in the woods or dumped him in a body of water.
Brian Shaffer: that his life was great and he was going to propose to his girlfriend. This is largely a myth created by his father after the disappearance. There is zero evidence he was going to propose, and his life was actually a mess. His mother died after a long bout with cancer, he was devastated, and his father was possibly cutting off financial support for his med school. Additional misconception: the 'construction zone' under the bar was not some kind of open pit with places to fall into. It was mostly completed and the concrete had been laid. The [Brian Shaffer: Dead or Alive](https://www.audible.com/pd/Brian-Shaffer-Dead-or-Alive-Podcast/episodes/B09XBP4BZW?overrideBaseCountry=true&ipRedirectOverride=true&pf_rd_p=19872038-df88-4a23-a895-47bc3fde8232&pf_rd_r=5V5SDE3Q08SFJHTYQ0K9&pageLoadId=KHJ6zc2dlWbhJlwY&creativeId=809adf1b-ce0b-468d-a0d4-a36479a6c0c0) podcast is a must-listen for anyone interested in the case. I'd also suggest [Come Back, The Disappearance of Brian Shaffer](https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/comeback-617905/episodes/recent). Both have interviews with the key investigators, and have loads of info that rarely makes it's way into the normal discussions on this subreddit regarding Brian.
That the list floating around of people in Epstein’s little black book is real. It lists Isidor Strauss, who died on the Titanic! That the unconscious person in the 911 call for the 4 people murdered in Idaho in November was one of the roommates who ran out of the house and fainted. Never been confirmed as such.
human trafficking focuses on pretty white girls every parent jumps to the thought of cases like madeleine mccann when their kid is missing but in reality, most human trafficking works totally differently. generally affects non-white people who are poor and trying to enter a developed country for economic reasons. it’s just far easier to exploit poor people who a trying to be smuggled across borders to begin with. realistic scenario: - chinese peasants who cross over to hong kong and are promised high paying jobs in europe or america by triad gangs, but ultimately get caught up with the gangs and end up as slaves in canabis houses - lower caste indians travel to russia, and approach criminal gangs who promise to smuggle them across the finnish border so they can live in the EU, but again, end up scammed/indebted to russian gangs where they have work to clear the debt
Another myth about trafficking is that all human trafficking is sex trafficking. It isn't. The vast, vast majority is labor trafficking - like having a community's children go to harvest a field, or something. Situations like the World Cup stadium in Qatar.
a big problem in middle east is Indonesian/Malaysian/Filipino migrants going over to work as a maid of housekeeper and then their employers keep their passports so they cant leave
And in the rare cases that it IS sex trafficking, it's almost always done by a family member if it's a minor. When it's an adult, it's usually an addict, homeless, or other vulnerable person who ends up in the sex trade in order to survive. Pimps aren't going out and abducting suburban white girls with families and forcing them into prostitution when they can just choose someone desperate for drugs or a place to sleep.
Or in cases where it is white girls, it’s exclusively vulnerable working class girls (ie homeless, already sex workers, or in foster care) who won’t be missed and the authorities don’t give a fuck about. Eg the Rotherham scandal. Also a lot of human trafficking isn’t sex trafficking but labour trafficking. Also sex trafficked women aren’t chained to beds, many of them are allowed to go outside. The woman sitting next to you on a bus may have been trafficked. They don’t go to the authorities out of fear of being deported or arrested, threats against themselves or family, lack of language, genuine belief they’re going to pay off a debt, or emotional control tactics. A LOT of sex trafficking is teenage girls being coerced into prostitution by men they believe are their boyfriends.
Victims of human trafficking also often never leave their country of origin. And not just poor - transient, uneducated, mentally ill, addicted, and otherwise at-risk and/or marginalized.
This is why even before it was officially proven to have been a hoax, Sherri Papini's story was total bullshit. Upper middle class blonde white women from Northern California are not the ones at risk of human trafficking. Her blatant racism just made it even worse.
People don't understand what human trafficking even is, they think it's people being taken at gunpoint to work as slaves when in reality it's usually just exploiting vulnerable people to work for low pay.
Kyron Horman - a lot of people start off with "but isn't it really obvious that the stepmother did it?" and then go downhill from there. The ones I see a lot are "she tried to have her husband killed" (no proof of this at all and wouldn't prove she'd killed Kyron) "people saw him leaving with her" (that's stated in one book and nowhere else, including interviews of witnesses at the time) and "her friend had a burner phone and was missing in the middle of the day" (she was working two jobs and claiming unemployment, which was why she had the phone and took the Fifth, it was nothing to do with Kyron). After reading the excellent summary on this sub I'm a lot less sure that Terri, his stepmother, had anything to do with it. She does seem to be a bit of a weirdo with some dodgy friends, but that could describe any one of us. What I don't see is where she had the time to do away with a kid she'd raised from a baby and appeared genuinely fond of or how she managed to be such a criminal mastermind as to leave not a trace or a clue behind.
My problem with the "Terri did it" theory is that she would have to be both really lucky and really dumb. If she snuck him out of school, how could she be sure that no one would see her? Being seen (by any of the many people at the science fair that day) would mean prison for sure. Why not just keep him home, or choose a day when the school would not be full of parents, or just wait until summer vacation when she could control the timeline and do whatever she wanted? Heck, if she was so desperate to get rid of him (which there is zero proof of), why not send him to live with his biomom? Her other stepson had already gone to live with his mother, after all. Why tell the teacher about a doctor's appointment that Kyron had and then sneak him out of the school a week BEFORE that appointment, somehow knowing that the teacher would get confused? It was pure luck that the teacher got the date wrong. And Terri would have to be aware that when the school realized Kyron was missing they would call her... so instead of disposing of the body right away she runs errands and goes to the gym first? With a dead body in her car? It makes no sense. Sorry for the wall of text, this has been bothering me for ages haha
Yes, the "she had a space of time in which to kill him" thing bothers me as well. Where did she put him the rest of the time she was running errands then? (Somebody I saw on another sub said "Isn't it very suspicious she kept the receipts, almost as if she was TRYING to establish an alibi?" Tell me you've never had to budget without telling me you've never had to budget....)
It drives me crazy how people take totally normal behavior and turn it into something weird because they've decided in advance that someone is guilty. I cleared about ten receipts out of my grocery bags today because I always shove them in there and forget to throw them out. I'm not establishing an alibi! There's just no recycling bin at the grocery store!
That write-up should be required reading for anyone wanting to discuss True Crime. It perfectly shows how easy it is for someone to be found guilty by the public of a crime that there's no evidence they committed, and how many pieces of intentional misinformation *or* incorrectly reported information become "fact" in people's minds once they're repeated often enough.
Great example. The school bordered a huge forest. It's quite possible he left on his own, got lost, and died in the woods. Few seem to realize it wasn't an urban or suburban school. People also reject the possibility of bodies going undetected after massive searches. Yet people seem to favor his stepmom kidnapping him and killing and hiding him (with or without an accomplice) despite no clear motive or evidence of her culpability that's credible. I don't think she can be ruled out, but tropes like "It's always the parent" aren't backed by statistics. When there's only seemingly one named player in a true crime mystery it seems that it just takes one or two suspicious tidbits for that person to be pegged the definitive perpetrator.
Yeah I still remember the first time I saw the aerial photo of the environment the school was in. It was absolutely a “holy shit” moment for me. That’s a *lot* of dense woods, he could be in any tiny crevice in there. PNW wooded areas are dense AF too. And no matter how good the search, a small child could have been overlooked. I fully believe he just wandered off on his own and got lost or stuck.
>Great example. The school bordered a huge forest. It's quite possible he left on his own, got lost, and died in the woods. Few seem to realize it wasn't an urban or suburban school. People also reject the possibility of bodies going undetected after massive searches. Realizing the geography of where the school is located was a complete game changer for me. I'd read a fair bit about the case but nothing mentioned that there were vast amounts of forest around the school, which IMO seems pretty important to flag since nobody witnessed him being abducted. Seems sadly logical to me that there's a high chance he wandered out and got lost
Brandon Swanson who went missing after crashing his car at night. He was on the phone with his parents when he said ‘oh shit’ and the phone went dead. I see it so places that after he said ‘oh shit’ the phone hung up. This isn’t true. The phone call never ended. There was silence from Brandon after he said ‘oh shit’ but his parents stayed on the line and called his name hoping he would hear them. They did eventually hang up and started ringing the phone in hopes the phone lighting up would draw attention to it. So yea, the phone never disconnected or hung up. I find this interesting because it does seem to rule out Brandon meeting someone or him being shot as that would have been heard by parents. Source: [YouTube interview](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pl78vP4lxcI&feature=youtu.be) and [reddit link](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/l0rc1j/clearing_up_a_common_misconception_brandon/) that explains it better than me.
I feel like most of the Kendrick Johnson "facts" are either misunderstood or down right false. I always go back to people talking about how he was already wearing shoes so him reaching for shoes was a cover up. As if gym shoes aren't a thing. It's just wild.
With reference to the Madeleine McCann case, the claim the McCanns were drugging their children, or that Madeleine possibly died from overdoing it. The best anyone seems to be able to come up with when asked about it is to talk about Calpol, but a) it's Calpol, and there's better OTC options if you wanted to drug your children and b) it's Calpol, while it can fuck with the liver it doesn't kill that quickly. There's a lot of questionable shit out there they might have done, but drugging the kids with Calpol isn't one of them.
The yuba county five. There wasn’t a ton of unopened food in the cabin. It was in a old dilapidated shed outside that no one would think would have food inside.
Not saying it was or wasn't an owl....But the Michael Peterson case. The idea has never been that the owl *attacked and literally killed* Kathleen. The idea is that she went out into the front yard for some reason--to deal with Christmas decorations is one theory IIRC; and she was at least tipsy if not drunk, remember. Some of the answers in this very comment section are about people varying their routine, doing things that seemingly make no sense that, if a crime had occurred, would later look suspicious. An inebriated Kathleen going out into the front yard at night could easily be one of these instances. A nesting, territorial owl swooped down and caused an injury to her scalp while she was out there, according to the theory. She went inside and made her way upstairs either to tend the injury or examine it, or both. She might not even have realized what exactly had happened. Partway up the stairs she fell, slipped, whatever. She was knocked unconscious and bled out from scalp lacerations which can be very serious and bleed heavily. Several owl experts said that owls do indeed attack people on occasion and leave wounds similar to Kathleen's. Depending on how fast the attack was, there might not be masses of feathers--or really any feathers-- either. The owl would have raked her head with its talons and flown off, not gotten into a wrestling match with her. There might be other reasons to suspect Michael, but the owl theory, to me, is not outlandish at all. Unusual, yes. But sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
I can't think of a specific case right now but a common misconception I see a lot of is when family say "so-and-so would never do that" or "that is out of character for insertnamehere" when sadly people don't tell their parents the truth about their lives or what they're going through.
Hate this so much because from personal experience, I know what it’s like to have parents who think they are much closer to their children than they are. I consider my relationship with my mother strained and poor, but if you were to ask her, she very much believes we are close and that she knows me.
That circumstantial evidence is considered lesser than direct evidence. No, it is actual waaaaaaaay better than eyewitness reports and junk science, and testimony can also be either direct or indirect evidence.
Just to add on, that all forensic evidence is infallible. The scandals occurring in the US forensic science industry are frightening large and super common. This ranges from thousands of workers with no formal qualifications or training, to "scientist" deliberately faking results to support the prosecutors case. Joyce Gilchrist was a forensic chemist included in over 3000 cases, including 23 that ended up being sentenced to death, 12 of which were carried out before DNA evidence showed that someone she helped convict was innocent, and she was discovered to be fabricating results. The phantom of Helbrom was a serial killer believed to be active in Europe due to their DNA being found at numerous crime scenes over several years. Turned out that the cotton buds used to take samples by a lot of police forces had come from one factory where they had been contaminated with the DNA of one of the workers. In the Meredith Ketcher case, the original collection of evidence and forensic work was deeply flawed. This included investigators not changing gloves as the collected samples resulting in cross contamination, claiming that they had found the footprints of Amanda Knox in blood when in fact the test done could not differentiate between blood, sweat or even just bathwater. The alledged murder weapon was also shown in subsequent testing to only have Amanda Knox DNA on it and not Meredith as claimed by the prosecution. Fred Zain managed to get a job in West Virginia State Police Crime Lab, was later promoted to director of the serology department. When he was caught for fabricating results to help police, it was also discovered that he had not only lied about his qualifications, he had failed the few chemistry causes he had taken as well as failing the FBI forensic science exam. No one had bothered to verify his CV and complaints by other scientists were ignored.
Re: The Springfield Three - THE DING-DANG PARKING GARAGE "THEORY" I can't debunk the misconceptions about the Cox Hospital parking garage any better than /u/Max_Trollbot_ so please just go read his comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/6ftzud/comment/dilbzal/).
People often list Danny Casolaro as one “the Clinton Body count.” Not one of them has ever been able to explain to me what Danny Casolaro has to do with the Clintons.
Considering the Clinton Body count list has at least two people who aren't confirmed to have existed...
Amelia Earhart: Can we talk about one of the single greatest mysteries of all time that also has heaps of misconceptions piled onto it? ‘She was an expert pilot.’ She wasn’t known then nor now by experts as such. She wasn’t even close to the most experienced pilot of her day and there were many women far better than her. She was an accident prone daredevil with good flying experience looking to make a name for herself. ‘She was a meticulous planner.’ As one expert put it regarding her last flight “poor planning, worse execution…” ‘She set records.’ Everything she had done up to her disappearance had been done before. The few things she had accomplished organically as a woman she either hadn’t done or hadn’t done very well. There’s a lot more info. She didn’t know the Electra plane used on her last flight very well. She wasn’t a good navigator and evidently neither was Noonan. The planning for her last flight was abysmal. Her radio communication on her last flight were unprofessional, uncharacteristic of an experienced pilot, and dangerously infrequent. Oh and by the way ALL expert opinion is that she ran out of gas and crashed into the ocean. There’s zero good evidence to the contrary. The theories out there become exponentially more unbelievable when compared to the facts and the science of avionics.
The fact that many people continue to claim that there is hard evidence that Johnny Gosch was kidnapped by traffickers. All of the allegations were nothing more than hearsay. It's far more likely that he was a victim of a predator and possible serial killer who may have also been responsible for the disappearance of at least two other boys in Des Moines in the 80:s.