Your favorite unsolved mystery

How Fort Sumner beat Hagerman in the 2001 New Mexico 1A semifinals.

 

These things drive people nuts because there is a right answer. Someone was D.B. Cooper. Something happened to him. Lee Harvey Oswald did or did not act alone. There's a right answer. And my journalistic instincts are still alive enough that it tends to drive me - and plenty of others - crazy thinking that there has to be some way to get at these right answers.

 

I've always suspected it was the son, but the parents covered it up.

 

Yes, you die and then all the answers are made available to you. Which leads me to another unsolved mystery: life after death?

 

By the way, I read recently that they were doing chemical analysis on the tie he left behind. Using technology not available at the time, they're hoping to determine if the tie picked up particular elements -- a combination of which could point to certain Boeing plants and allow investigators to pinpoint possible places where Cooper was employed.

 

Yeah, I talked about that on the initial post of this thread.

 

TL; DR

 

What's surprising about the Hoffa thing is that a mob hit is usually pretty public. Did they disappear him because there would be more pressure to investigate a Hoffa killing than your average mob hit.

Some "mysteries" get built up over time. The time leads to increased speculation that lead to theories that are more involved and elaborate to "justify" the fact that they haven't been solved. (Big conspiracy/cover-up, powerful people don't want something solved). I think some of these "cover-ups" have more to do with initial investigations covering up sloppy early police work that derail things more than anything else.

The Jon Benet thing was weird. I can imagine the investigators suddenly besieged by press without warning. The missing young women stories that cable TV became addicted to were bizarre.

 

Even setting aside the fact that he never gets on the plane to begin with, they would know who D.B. Cooper was within a few hours if it happened today.

 

1. Zodiac most fascinates me. The cryptography, the unusual pattern and methods of killing. A second would be Jack the Ripper.

B. It's my understanding that the parents have been cleared of the JonBenet murder by people who have looked at it.

iii. 20 years ago the torso of a Swedish nanny was found in a dumpster in Boston and there has never been any good leads.

4. The Boston Strangler is solved, but there are theories DeSalvo didn't commit all the murders.

Bill James wrote a true crime book in which he looked at a bunch of murders, solved and unsolved, and gave his opinion on what happened. I would suggest getting it from the library and browsing through it, reading what you are interested in.

 

It's hard to put this under "favorite" ... but for people in their mid-40s or above, Adam Walsh's murder stands out. It was the first time I can recall an abduction by a stranger being that kind of big news, it was a huge TV movie and then it launched John Walsh's show.

I didn't put a whole lot of thought into it, and police eventually pinned it on a local drifter ... but then a newspaper report came out maybe 10 years ago that Jeffrey Dahmer lived in south Florida at the time, had access to a van that looked like the one police spent years looking for, and two witnesses said he was near the mall that day. Police asked him about it but he said no, so they ended it there under the rationale that he was telling him about all the other killings so why wouldn't he have copped to that one, but there isn't a whole lot of good evidence connecting the guy they did eventually decide on.

 

Dahmer doesn't make sense considering his other victims.