Some of the most unexplainable deaths still have huge question marks over them, all these years later, and we’re desperate for them to get solved.
They never moved
It’s hard to know where to start with Kevin Ives and Don Henry’s deaths. They were hit by a freight train on August 23, 1987, near Alexander, Arkansas. Except, both boys had been lying motionless across the tracks when they were hit.
Investigators claimed they’d smoked marijuana, become unconscious, and passed out on the tracks. But that wasn’t true. Another pathologist found very little marijuana, but did find head trauma and stab wounds from before the impact. Nobody was ever charged with their murders.
A timetable with no explanation
It all started with a handwritten note. The note told Miguel Viana and Manoel da Cruz when to arrive, when to swallow capsules, and when to put on lead eye masks. These details are already strange enough, but it only gets weirder.
The two were found dead on August 20, 1966, on Morro do Vintém near Niterói, Brazil. They had no obvious injuries, and investigators couldn’t figure out what was in the capsules. All they found were instructions and homemade masks, along with the two bodies.
The road went the wrong way
There’s nothing about the Yuba County Five’s route that made sense. The group of five friends had just finished watching a basketball game on February 24, 1978, and were supposed to head home. They didn’t. They drove deep into the mountains instead.
Investigators later found their car, still with fuel, still able to run. Yet they left it behind. Four of the men’s bodies were found, including one who’d starved to death inside a Forest Service trailer stocked with food and heating supplies. Gary Mathias’s body was never found.
Nothing fit one answer
The thing with Cindy James was that, for years, she’d said someone was stalking her. She’d reported threatening calls, fires, break-ins, and violent attacks. But police could never find the suspect. Then, on May 25, 1989, she disappeared, and her body turned up two weeks later.
She was found beside an abandoned house, hands and feet tied behind her. There was nylon wrapped around her neck. The autopsy report said she’d died from a lethal mixture of drugs, with police calling it a suicide. A coroner’s jury said an unknown event.
The room he never used
Blair Adams was similar to Cindy James because he appeared frightened, although it was never clear why. He suddenly left British Columbia in July 1996 and flew from Seattle to Washington, D.C. That wasn’t all. He then hired a car and drove to Knoxville, Tennessee.
His loved ones said he had no connections in Knoxville. Adams also booked a motel room, and by the following morning, he was found dead near another motel still under construction. His cash and valuables were still nearby.
Two pages in a pocket
Two coded pages. That’s all that was left in Ricky McCormick’s pockets when his badly decomposed body was found, just two coded pages. He was discovered in a Missouri field on June 30, 1999, and weirdly enough, the medical examiner couldn’t identify a cause of death.
Police treated it as a homicide, though. Now onto the pages. To this day, there are some parts that FBI codebreakers and outside experts haven’t been able to crack. It’s kind of annoying, really. They could explain where he went, they could be nothing at all. We’ll never know.
North instead of home
Federal prosecutor Jonathan Luna left his Baltimore office on December 3, 2003, and then drove north. Nobody knows why. It wasn’t until later, much later, that he was found face down in a Pennsylvania creek, around 95 miles away from his home. He’d been stabbed 36 times.
But it gets stranger because the autopsy revealed both blood loss and drowning ended Luna’s life. No suspect was ever identified, no arrest ever followed. He went the wrong way, that’s a fact, but where did he end up?
A hole below the roofline
All it took was a single phone call to send Rey Rivera rushing out of his Baltimore home on May 16, 2006. His body was found eight days later in a closed-off room beneath the Belvedere Hotel, and that’s basically all we know about him.
Police did find a strange note taped behind Rivera’s computer, but the FBI said it wasn’t a suicide note. They never managed to find the caller, either. It seems every single part of the case is disputed, including the exact way Rivera ended up underneath the Hotel.
Every name led nowhere
Where do we even start with Jennifer Fergate? Her name, for one, was probably false, and so was everything else she told hotel staff when she checked into Oslo Plaza in May 1995. Her Belgian address, her phone number, her workplace, they were all fake.
Hotel workers found her in her hotel room on June 3 with a gunshot wound to the head. She’d been shot with a Browning pistol ghost gun. The police leaned in favor of suicide, although no gunshot residue was ever found on her hands. She had no ID, cards, or even clothing labels.
One trip from deck to water
The water can be pretty deadly, and Natalie Wood’s loved ones know that all too well. She vanished from the yacht Splendour during a trip near Santa Catalina Island, and was found drowned on November 29, 1981. It was originally believed that Wood accidentally fell.
But then decades later, investigators reopened the case, changing her death certificate to say that she died because of ‘drowning and other undetermined factors.’ Her loved ones said she feared deep water, so the fact she was in the water at all doesn’t make sense. None at all.
The final flight to Ndola
He was supposed to arrive in Ndola, Zambia, for ceasefire talks. That’s what Dag Hammarskjöld was meant to be doing, but on September 18, 1961, his DC-6 plane went down nearby. He died with fifteen other people on board.
It seemed like an accident, at least at the time, but investigators couldn’t find a single cause for the crash. Witnesses also mentioned seeing flashes and possible gunfire. The mystery only deepened when some files went missing, and even now, we’re not sure what happened.
Seven miles short of the meeting
Karen Silkwood had only seven miles left. She was planning to meet a New York Times reporter and a union official on November 13, 1974. But she never got there. Instead, her car crossed the road and slammed into a concrete culvert, although nobody knows why.
It’s possible she passed out because of her prescribed medication. It’s also possible that she was murdered, as she was carrying top-secret documents about the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant. These papers completely disappeared.
Nine days changed the story
Some of the most mysterious deaths seem to be inside jobs. Take Frank Olson, for example, who the CIA had been secretly giving LSD. He went through a tenth-floor New York hotel window on November 28, 1953, but the CIA tried to pass it off as a suicide.
His family didn’t believe it, though, and they were proven right in 1994 when his body was exhumed. Turns out, there was an unexplained injury on his forehead, and none of the glass cuts from the original autopsy. Could be murder, could be something else. We don’t know.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
The 10 manliest deaths in the history of mankind
It doesn’t matter that there was a way out, or at least a chance at one, because some guys still went with the more difficult option, knowing that it would save lives.
