Your favorite unsolved mystery

Shit, I'm going senile. I don't remember posting that.

Or maybe it was the other night when I took an Ambien...

 

Haven't read the whole thread, but soon as I saw the title was also thinking DB Cooper. Think I've seen at least four different shows on him.

 

Natalee Holloway.

 

I think there's a ton of stuff out there on this. Books, documentaries, checkout Netflix.

 

Does that one really qualify as "unsolved"?

Conviction or not, it's rather clear who did it by now.

 

Expedition Unknown is a delightful show and Josh Gates is a fantastic host. It's a bit more grounded than his previous show, which was called Destination Truth and aired on SyFy. While he's focused on DB Cooper, Amelia Earhart, supposed lost Nazi treasure and like on Expedition Unknown, he did more cryptozoological searches on Destination Truth.

Gates actually earned some press for some physical evidence he found while searching for the Yeti Himalayas. During one search he found footprints which were later cast, confirmed to be anthropomorphicly accurate (thus not man-made). The hair sample found on a second trip was put through a DNA sequence and determined that despite being actual hair and not man-made, it didn't match any known animal.

Is it a Yeti? Who knows. But at least it's some sort of tangible evidence in the search for an unknown animal.

JFK, DB Cooper and Amelia Earhart are the ones that fascinate me. Mostly because there are a couple of logical theories backed by evidence for each case.

 

Maybe, but I was referring more to her never having been found.

 

Right, but they're all just a bunch of theories (some more plausible than others), correct? I don't think investigators have ever named a suspect in either murder and they're really no closer to solving them than they were in the immediate aftermath.

I haven't seen "Murder Rap" on Netflix, but I'm dubious of its credibility. On its face, the film's theory (Diddy killed Tupac, Suge retaliated and killed Biggie) is plausible, but if it were as definitive as it is purported to be, I think it would have moved the needle more (he had to self publish the book and the film was released a year before anyone really even heard of it).

I think the most likely scenario in Tupac's murder is that the guy he and his friends beat up after the Tyson fight orchestrated the drive-by, or was perhaps even the trigger man.

 

I remember seeing a documentary, probably on VH1, that speculated Biggie was killed by a police officer with gang ties. I forget the details, but the theory seemed plausible.

 

The guys who escaped Alcatraz is another good one.

 

A recent one: what is the truth behind the West Memphis Three? I read a breakdown of a lot of things the documentaries supposedly left out. Those films went a long way toward convincing people that the original three suspects (convicted, then released after an Alford plea) were innocent.

But if it wasn't those three suspects, then who did it?

 

Excellent pull. They sure seemed innocent to me, but obviously we're getting this stuff to us from people with a point of view to express, much like "Making a Murderer."

Like I said earlier, I spent a year investigating a series of murders. The amount of paper and interviews you have to do to drill down is simply astounding. We had to write up a report to the city and then present to the State's Attorney and her team. It was clear the guys were all innocent and had been locked up for two decades. The whole case was preposterous. But the SA still didn't believe it. It was frustrating, because their case was laughable. Eventually a judge did.

There were three murders, all connected by a single jailhouse snitch who was likely working in concert with a corrupt local detective. Two of them were pretty obvious - local gang bangers hitting another gang banger. Who actually did them isn't all that interesting. But the other one was a 31-year-old married father of two shot in his van at 4 or 5 in the morning while warming it up to drive to work. Didn't have a known enemy in the world. Nothing stolen. That one drives me crazy, to this day.