Top 15 creepiest historical mysteries that have been solved

Some cold cases sat for years with missing names and unexplained bodies, until somebody finally found the piece everyone else had missed.

A neighbor nobody suspected

Christine Jessop was just nine years old when she disappeared from Queensville, Ontario, on October 3, 1984. Her body turned up nearly three months later. The police conducted an investigation and believed they’d found the man who did it, a neighbor called Guy Paul Morin. 

Except he hadn’t done it, as DNA cleared him in 1995. The case then went cold for a whole 25 years. Eventually, though, genetic genealogy in 2020 pointed police to Calvin Hoover, a friend of the family who had killed himself in 2015.

A life hidden behind another name

Nothing really made sense about a woman supposedly named Tonya Hughes. She died during a hit-and-run in 1990 in Oklahoma City, and investigators began looking into her past shortly after. They found all kinds of fake names and false records. She was also apparently married to a man named Franklin Delano Floyd, who was a fugitive.

That was just the tip of the iceberg. The FBI reopened the case in 2013, and Floyd eventually revealed the truth. ‘Tonya’ was actually Suzanne Marie Sevakis, a child he’d kidnapped years earlier. Both DNA and old records confirmed Floyd’s claims in 2014.

Something strange kept reaching the beaches

The beaches in British Columbia were a creepy place to be in 2007. A shoe washed ashore one day with a human foot still inside it, and then another appeared. So did another. People kept finding feet along coastlines in British Columbia and Washington. The obvious questions were who on earth was doing this, and why?

Turns out, nobody was doing it. DNA identified many of the feet as belonging to missing people, and there were no signs they’d been deliberately cut off. Bodies may sometimes naturally separate at the joints during decomposition, and modern sneakers usually float. The incident was strange, yes, but not as sinister as it first appeared.

The dunes finally gave up a name

A teenager found something horrific on July 26, 1974, in the sand dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was the badly mutilated body of a woman. It was so badly mutilated, in fact, that it was impossible to identify by sight, and police called her the Lady of the Dunes. Nobody knew who she was.

But in 2022, investigators used genealogy research to finally identify her as Ruth Marie Terry, 37, from Tennessee. The answer about what happened to her came a year later. Her husband, Guy Rockwell Muldavin, had killed her, although he died 20 years before police learned the truth.

Deadly envelopes in the mail

Opening the mail in late 2001 could be deadly. Several letters were sent to media offices and U.S. senators after September 11, and these letters contained anthrax. Five people died, and 17 others became sick. The FBI soon began investigating, but they couldn’t find the culprit.

They eventually turned their eyes on Army scientist Bruce Ivins, who died by suicide in 2008 before he could face charges. The Justice Department closed the case in 2010 and named Ivins as the lone culprit.

The missing boy walked into a police station

Steven Stayner was seven years old when he vanished while walking home from school in Merced, California, in December 1972. Nobody knew where he went. Nobody, that is, apart from Kenneth Parnell, his kidnapper. Parnell gave him a fake name and kept him for years. 

Parnell then abducted five-year-old Timothy White in 1980, but Steven decided he wasn’t going to let the same thing happen again. He escaped with Timothy and walked into a police station in Ukiah after being gone for seven years.

An answer after nearly 27 years

Jacob Wetterling should’ve been safe when he was riding home on October 22, 1989. He was with his brother and a friend near St. Joseph, Minnesota, when a masked man stopped them. 11-year-old Jacob was taken away, and nobody heard anything for decades. The case became one of America’s most famous missing-child cases.

But a break finally came in 2016 when investigators struck a deal with a man named Danny Heinrich during a separate federal case. Heinrich confessed to abducting and killing Jacob. He took them to Jacob’s burial place, and the boy’s remains were found September 2. It had been a 27-year wait.

The abandoned house wasn’t what it seemed

Joseph and Summer McStay disappeared with their two young sons in February 2010. Police arrived at their home in Fallbrook, California, expecting to find clues, but everything was normal. Their dogs were still there, and so were a lot of their possessions. They did find the family’s vehicle close to the Mexican border, so they suspected the McStays simply left the country.

They hadn’t. It took a few years, but in 2013, all four bodies were found buried near Victorville. The authorities arrested Joseph’s business associate, Charles ‘Chase’ Merritt, the next year, and he was convicted of murdering the entire family in 2019.

A forgotten name in an old police file

The only thing worse than a single child disappearing is two of them vanishing. That’s what happened to 12-year-old Sheila and 10-year-old Katherine Lyon, who left home for Wheaton Plaza in Maryland on March 25, 1975. They were never seen again. Police did question plenty of people, including a young man named Lloyd Lee Welch Jr., but the case went cold.

New detectives assigned to the case went back through the files decades later. They looked at Welch again, and in 2015, he was eventually indicted for the girls’ murder. He pleaded guilty to killing them in 2017, although their bodies have never been found.

The salad bars weren’t contaminated by accident

In September 1984, people around The Dalles, Oregon, started getting sick, and it was first assumed to be a nasty local food-poisoning outbreak. It was very nasty, in fact. 751 people got sick, and 45 went to the hospital, but investigators couldn’t find where it was coming from. But then they had a breakthrough.

All of the cases came from restaurant salad bars across town, and the investigators worked out that the salmonella bacteria hadn’t arrived by accident. Members of the Rajneeshee commune had deliberately contaminated food with it. They did it as a test run to influence a local election. It was the first, and currently the biggest ever, bioterror attack on American soil. 

Forty years without her real name

A teenager was found murdered at Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown, New Jersey, on July 15, 1982. For forty years, she had no name and was just called Princess Doe. The damage to her face was so severe that identification seemed impossible.

The answer finally came in 2022 through genetic genealogy and DNA matches. Her name was Dawn Olanick, and she was a 17-year-old from Long Island. Authorities charged convicted murderer Arthur Kinlaw with killing her.

The caller eventually gave himself away

Minnesota police were dealing with a particularly difficult case in the early 1980s. Women were being attacked by a strange man who would call the cops after attacking them. He’d talk as if he were crying. Yes, he’d talk in a high-pitched voice, sometimes giving details that made police realize that the caller probably knew far too much. He was called the Weepy-Voiced Killer. 

But there were no leads on who this man could be, no matter how hard police tried. That is, until 1982. A woman named Denise Williams fought off an attacker, and the man was injured badly enough to seek help himself. Authorities recognized the voice. The killer was Paul Michael Stephani, and he was eventually convicted. He died in 1998.

An early internet search found the missing connection

You might think ‘Tent Girl’ sounds like a cute nickname. It’s not. It was the name given to a real unidentified woman found near Georgetown, Kentucky, in 1968. Her body had been wrapped in tent canvas. Police couldn’t figure out who she was, so it became a cold case.

Decades later, a man named Todd Matthews started poking around early online missing-person databases. His father-in-law had found the body, so he had an interest in solving the case. He did. One missing woman, Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor, looked like a promising lead, and DNA testing finally confirmed it in 1998. Police believe her now-deceased husband killed her.

One word replaced an entire identity

An elderly Chicago resident lived by a very unusual name for several years. They called themself Seven. They weren’t trying to hide their identity or anything, as severe memory problems had left Seven unable to provide much useful information. They died in 2015, and the mystery lingered.

Investigators tried looking at their fingerprints again, and in 2023, they finally found a match in military records. Seven was Reba C. Bailey, a 75-year-old Army veteran whose relatives had lost contact with them decades earlier. They used one fingerprint to solve what years of questions couldn’t.

The ocean noise had a frozen source

The Bloop was one of the strangest mysteries around. It began in 1997, when underwater microphones picked up an enormous low-frequency sound in the Pacific. Sensors more than 2,000 miles apart heard it. Whatever it was seemed to be a huge animal, a giant one, in fact.

But it wasn’t anything near as exciting or dangerous. Similar recordings near Antarctica matched sounds made by huge masses of ice cracking apart. NOAA linked the Bloop in 2005 to an icequake. It sure was disappointing.

Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.

12 historical mysteries researchers are still trying to solve

Despite centuries of research, these historical mysteries continue to puzzle experts and inspire endless debate.

12 historical mysteries researchers are still trying to solve