Finding out how someone died should be something relatively straightforward, but in the case of some people, even official investigations struggled to explain the details left behind.
The wounds that raised questions
27-year-old Ellen Greenberg was found dead in her Philadelphia apartment on January 26, 2011, with twenty knife wounds to her body. Investigators ruled it a suicide. Yes, really, despite the fact that some of the wounds were on the back of her neck and nearly impossible for her to inflict herself. Her death was initially ruled a homicide before being changed to suicide.
Then, in 2025, a new review discovered that she had three more wounds on her body, as well as 20 bruises that were previously undocumented. That meant she had 23 wounds and 31 bruises in total. Still, the suicide ruling remained unchanged, even though it doesn’t take a genius to see how unlikely that was.
The terrible gym accident
The official story about 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson’s death is that he went looking for a missing pair of sneakers and died. His body was found on January 11, 2013, inside a rolled-up wrestling mat at his school. According to investigators, he climbed inside to get his shoes.
They said that he then became trapped and suffocated, essentially making the whole thing a freak accident. But Johnson’s own family disagreed with that finding, and a private autopsy also reported the cause of death was blunt force trauma. We just don’t know what happened.
The hotel rooftop mystery
In February 2013, hotel guests at Los Angeles’s Cecil Hotel began complaining that their water was black, so staff conducted an investigation. They discovered there was a dead body inside the water tank. It was the body of 21-year-old Canadian student Elisa Lam, who had been missing for weeks, and she somehow got inside a rooftop water tank.
The coroner officially ruled her death an accidental drowning and blamed Lam’s bipolar disorder for her crawling inside the tank. Except, it’s a complete mystery how she managed to get inside the tank, or how it closed behind her.
The night aboard the Splendour
Natalie Wood wasn’t a strong swimmer, and she knew that. It’s part of the reason why her death is so strange. On November 28, 1981, the actress went on a weekend yacht trip and disappeared near California’s Catalina Island. Her body was discovered floating in the water the next morning, leading to officials ruling it an accidental drowning.
But then, in 2011, investigators reopened the case. They found there were a number of unexplained injuries and bruises on her body that just didn’t seem to fit with the narrative of a drowning. A year later, her death certificate was changed to say she died due to drowning and ‘other undetermined factors.’ What those factors are, we’ll probably never know.
The gasoline-soaked car
You might know Bobby Fuller as being the lead member of the band The Bobby Fuller Four, who became popular for their cover of ‘I Fought the Law.’ On July 18, 1966, the singer was found dead in his mother’s Oldsmobile in Hollywood.
His body was completely soaked in gasoline, and he allegedly had a rubber tube connecting a fuel container to his hand. So, police initially believed it was a suicide. But then they changed the ruling to say it was an ‘accidental’ death without explaining why the gasoline was involved. It’s a complete mystery what happened in the car to the 23-year-old singer, and why.
The unfinished investigation
What happened to journalist Danny Casolaro sounds like something from a movie. He traveled to Martinsburg, West Virginia, as part of his investigation into government corruption. He never came back. Sadly, he was found dead in a bathtub at the Sheraton Hotel on August 10, 1991, with several cuts to his wrists.
That led authorities to rule his death a suicide, although there was a bit more to the story. Casolaro’s body was actually embalmed before a full autopsy took place. To nobody’s surprise, the whole investigation raised questions over its handling and led to numerous conspiracy theories.
Superman’s final night
One thing we know for a fact about George Reeves’ death is that he died from a gunshot wound. The Superman actor was upstairs at his Los Angeles home on June 16, 1959, and his fiancée was entertaining guests downstairs. Then witnesses heard a gunshot.
What made things so confusing was the fact that the gun seemed to have fired two additional shots, although there weren’t any usable fingerprints on the weapon. Police ruled his death a suicide. Reeves’ mother, however, wasn’t satisfied and had a second autopsy conducted. It found there were unexplained bruises, though it didn’t overturn the official ruling.
The locked garage
One of the last things actress Thelma Todd experienced before she died was a night out at a Hollywood nightclub. That was in December 1935. On the 16th, she was found inside her car in a garage near her Pacific Palisades restaurant, with the cause of death initially ruled as carbon monoxide poisoning.
Investigators believed she’d started the engine to keep herself warm because she was locked outside of her apartment. That doesn’t seem too strange. Except, there was more to the story, as Todd had been receiving threatening letters before her death, demanding that she pay $10,000 to some unknown party. Her death was still ruled an accident, though.
The nurse’s final disappearance
Cindy James claimed she was being stalked and threatened for years. She even said she’d been physically attacked. Then, on May 25, 1989, the Canadian nurse disappeared from Richmond, British Columbia, and her body turned up behind an abandoned house on June 8. Her hands and feet were tied behind her back.
When coroners conducted a toxicology test on her, they found lethal amounts of drugs like morphine in her system. Police did initially think that she’d caused her own injuries. They conducted a lengthy investigation, but eventually, they weren’t able to determine whether it was murder, suicide, or an accident.
The bag in the bathtub
You wouldn’t expect to find a dead body inside a sports bag, let alone a padlocked one, but that’s exactly what happened on August 23, 2010. British intelligence officer Gareth Williams’ body was found inside his bag, which was sitting in his bathtub.
Nobody could explain how he’d managed to get inside, or how he’d locked it behind him. In 2012, a coroner suggested he’d been murdered. But the police ruled it an accident. They said he’d got inside and somehow locked himself in, despite the fact that the lock was on the outside of the bag.
The prison cell injuries
Kenneth Trentadue was a prisoner at Oklahoma City’s Federal Transfer Center, and on August 21, 1995, his body was found battered and bruised. He was dead. In fact, there were so many injuries that investigators initially believed someone had beaten him to death. Prison officials disagreed.
They claimed he’d died by suicide after hanging himself with a bedsheet, and the Department of Justice later supported this explanation. It argued that his other injuries came from earlier attempts to hurt himself. A later investigation found that there were serious mistakes in how officials handled his death, and to this day, Trentadue’s family continues to question the ruling.
The illness that returned
Actress Brittany Murphy died on December 20, 2009, aged just 32. She collapsed at her home in the Hollywood Hills, and officials blamed pneumonia for her death. They also believed anemia and multiple drug intoxication were involved. But just a few months later, on May 23, 2010, Murphy’s husband Simon Monjack was found unresponsive in the same property.
Coroners determined that he’d died due to pneumonia and anemia, too. That’s right, five months and two deaths in the same property because of the same illness. The chances of that are very low. Some people believe that there was toxic mold in the house that killed the pair, although authorities never established that explanation.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
9 ‘unsolved’ mysteries where we’re actually pretty sure what happened
Podcasts love diving into unsolved mysteries, but these nine have answers the cops and historians already know.
9 ‘unsolved’ mysteries where we’re actually pretty sure what happened
