Cold Cases Solved In Unbelievable Ways

Everybody’s inner detective loves a good mystery. But some mysteries prove impossible to solve for years, and in the occasional cases where the truth finally comes out, it often proves stranger than even the most outlandish theories. From the man who lost 20 years of his life, to a surprising and bizarre UFO sighting explanation, let’s investigate some unsolved mysteries finally solved in unbelievable ways.

The Disappearance Of John Donovan

Hiking is a great way to experience nature, and navy veteran John Donavon loved the activity more than anything else. But when you’re hiking out in the wilds, danger is never far away.

On April 19th, 2005, not long after his retirement, John embarked on a hiking expedition along the beautiful Pacific Crest Trail. But as John approached the peak of Mount San Jacinto in California, a fierce snowstorm erupted. Regardless, John soldiered on, pushing through the storm.

But despite his apparent efforts, no amount of willpower could overcome the deadly, disorienting cold. He became lost, and never made it back to safety. Despite substantial efforts from friends, family, and local officials, they couldn’t find him, alive or dead, anywhere along the mountain trail. With nothing to go on, the tragedy became a cold case.

However, just over a year later, on May 6th, 2006, Brendan Day and Gina Allen, a couple from Dallas, went on a hiking expedition along the very same trail. While on a group tour, the couple managed to get totally lost out in the wilderness after veering off the path.

After several cold nights in the woods, alone and scared, the couple stumbled across something truly unbelievable. In one of the mountain’s rocky valleys, they found a backpack containing clothes and a journal.

Reading the journal, the couple soon figured out these were John Donovan’s belongings from a year prior, and they began to piece together John’s final days alone. John’s journal described how he’d become trapped in the area after sustaining a fall, and had slowly succumbed to the elements and starvation.

His body was nowhere in sight, but his backpack contained one more thing that sparked hope quite literally: an intact packet of matches! Terrified and desperate for rescue, the couple set fire to some trees to signal for help, and soon, a rescue helicopter appeared over the horizon.

With John Donovan’s journal finally providing an explanation for his disappearance, investigators returned to the area. John’s body was recovered from the forest just 50 yards from where the lost couple had found his backpack, though they’d never noticed.

With the stress they’d already suffered, not finding a dead body nearby was probably for the best. But over a year after his disappearance, John Donovan was finally lain to rest with full military honors, and the case was closed.

Cold Caller Mystery

Being on the receiving end of one prank call is bad enough, but imagine being on the receiving end of more than 2,600 over a period of 6 months. Donna Graybeal, in 1995, received 2,688 bizarre phone calls at her home in Billerica, Massachusetts. Every 90 minutes, for 6 long, tiresome months, the phone would ring.

But whenever Donna picked it up to confront the mysterious caller, she was greeted with what sounded like a whoosh of air, followed by a click and the caller hanging up. Eventually, Donna contacted the police, who managed to trace the calls back to the family home of Theodore and Elisabeth Jaymes of Potomac, Maryland. But the couple were just as baffled as Donna, and insisted they’d never contacted her.

They didn’t even know who she was. Confused, the police investigated further and eventually found the culprit. Now, you might guess it a teenager with too much time on their hands, or even a creepy stalker. But the reality was truly unexpected. The real culprit was, of all things, an old heating oil tank.

Residing in the Jaymes’ basement, the tank had been fitted with an auto-dialing device by its original manufacturer years before. The device was set to automatically ring the company to let them know that the tank was running low on fuel so they could restock it.

However, after the company stopped overseeing their residential oil tanks, the automated number was disconnected. It just so happened that, when Donna Greybeal set up a phone in her house for her home business, she was assigned the old number of the oil tank manufacturer.

At some point, the oil tank’s auto-dialer had somehow reactivated itself and started making non-stop calls to Graybeal, desperate to be refueled! So, next time a prankster calls your place asking for Mr. Hugh Janus, don’t get too mad; it may just be a heating tank that’s lost its way.

The Lost Decades Of Benjamin Kyle

Imagine waking up one day and not remembering a single thing about your life. It’s one of the scariest things that can happen to a person, and it’s exactly what happened to Benjamin Kyle.

The amnesiac man was found unconscious by a dumpster behind a Burger King in Richmond Hill, Georgia in 2004. He was covered in red ant bites and had indentations in his skull that seemed to suggest he’d been attacked with a blunt object.

But when he woke up, he couldn’t remember anything about his life, not even his own name, let alone how he’d got there. When he went to look in the mirror, he was shocked to see that he was 20 years older than he’d assumed he was.

Benjamin Kyle, the name he chose in lieu of whatever his real name was, couldn’t remember anything that’d happened in his life post-1980 and was diagnosed with severe dissociative amnesia. With no leads, Benjamin spent years in and out of various shelters, unable to work, as he had no idea what his social security number was.

But Benjamin’s story soon swept the press, and keen investigators began helping him piece his life together. With the help of DNA testing and computer-generated, de-aged photographs, researchers managed to determine his ancestral bloodline and find out who his relatives were.

And in 2015, Benjamin finally found out who he really was. This was where things got even stranger. Benjamin Kyle, it turned out, was actually someone called William Burgess Powell, who had been born in Indiana in 1948. In 1976, he’d cut ties with his family and moved to Boulder, Colorado.

Researchers were able to track the previous jobs he’d had up until 1983, after which he promptly dropped off the grid. He wouldn’t appear again on any records until he was found behind the Burger King in 2004, two decades later. While Kyle now knows who he really is, some huge mysteries remain.

Where on Earth was Benjamin Kyle for those missing twenty years? What had he been doing? And how did he end up battered and bruised behind a Burger King? As it stands, it looks like we, much like Benjamin, may never know.

Unidentified Flying Rods

There are an almost endless array of explanations for UFO sightings. From hot air balloons to ball lightning, plenty of theories, many of which are whacky in their own ways, have been put forward to counteract usually-unfounded claims of extraterrestrial visitors.

But one of the most feasible explanations for alleged photographs of UFO phenomena comes down to something surprisingly mundane and familiar. In many photographs of so-called UFOs around the world, strange little lines of light can be seen flashing across the skies.

Usually only spotted after the photo has been taken, these rods of light are believed by some among the UFO community to be tiny, fish-like entities that swim through the skies. Others believe them to be extradimensional spacecraft, giving them their bizarre, trailing appearances.

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But over the years, as theories about these strange anomalies have gathered steam, unconvinced non-believers have offered more skeptical viewpoints. In 2005, Tonghua Zhenguo Pharmaceutical Company in Jilin Province, China, decided to run their own tests to see what was really going on.

Armed with specialized nets and surveillance cameras, they hoped to catch some samples of whatever these strange little rod "aliens" really were. They snapped these tell-tale rods appearing on their cameras, but when they checked their nets, there were no aliens to be found, just moths and other flying insects.

It turned out, the UFO rods people had been capturing around the world were actually the result of motion-blurred, afterimage traces of insects’ wingbeats caught on camera, sometimes lit by camera-flashes. In low light, and with slow shutter-speeds, the longer exposure creates a trail of the insects’ paths, making moths and flies look like aliens. But just because the mystery of the alien rods has been solved and disproved, that doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t any aliens out there.

Death Valley Sailing Stones

When you think of things that are known for moving around, you probably picture cars and living things with legs. But the rocks in Death Valley, Nevada, have other ideas.

Racetrack Playa is an exceptionally flat, dry lakebed located on the West side of Death Valley and is 3,714 foot above sea level. Despite an apparent lack of any obvious causes, like flowing water or strong winds, the rocks in Racetrack Playa are famous for moving around.

They appear to glide along the surface of the dry lake during the night, leaving tracks hundreds of feet long and 3-12 inches deep. For decades, the mysterious moving rocks stumped anyone seeking an explanation.

In 2013, however, time lapse videos confirmed theories that had been developing throughout the late 20th century. It turned out, during particularly cold nights, thin sheets of ice form on the surface of the lakebed and around the rocks. Encased in very low-friction ice, the rocks are able to be pushed along by small amounts of wind, at up to 16ft per minute, leaving tracks in the dirt!

'Sailing Stones' of Death Valley Seen in Action | Video by LiveScience

During the day, the ice sheets melt away in the sun, leaving no evidence behind, save for their mysterious-seeming tracks. While the rocks might not be sentient enough to choose to move themselves around, you have to give them props for their ice-skating skills!

King Richard III Found Under A Parking Lot

This next mystery doesn’t just stretch back a few years, it stretches back centuries, into a disappearance of royal importance. King Richard III of England was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, and was laid to rest in Greyfriars Church in Leicester. However, around 50 years later, Henry VIII ordered the demolition of many monasteries, including Greyfriars, and consequently, Richard’s body was lost.

The legendary mystery of Richard’s final resting place endured for centuries, seemingly growing ever further from a definitive answer. But in the early 2000s, a collective of historians from the University of Leicester made a surprising realization. The site of the Greyfriars Church, it turned out, was likely buried underneath a parking lot in Leicester.

They began raising funds to excavate the site, and in August 2012, they discovered the skeleton of a young male with battle injuries matching the King’s reported demise. When a tooth from the remains was found to match DNA from a living descendant of the king, the researchers’ theories were proven right. The centuries-old case was finally closed, and Old King Rich posthumously became proud owner of one of the most famous parking spots of all time.

Richard III - The Archaeological Dig by University of Leicester

The Disappearance Of Star Dust

There are many cases of planes going missing seemingly without a trace, and many instances of this kind go unsolved forever. The disappearance of Star Dust, a British South American Airways airliner threatened to be yet another aviation mystery that would never be solved until 1998.

But first, let’s rewind to August 2nd, 1947. That evening, the Star Dust, along with its 5 passengers and 6 crew members, dropped off the grid during its flight from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Santiago, Chile.

The last communication with the plane came in at 17:41, when Santiago airport received a Morse code message saying, ‘ETA SANTIAGO 1745 HRS STENDEC’. Radio control were confused. While the first four words were clearly an estimated arrival time, what on earth did STENDEC mean? When they asked for clarification, the only answer they got was another two Morse code messages saying STENDEC, again.

Radio contact was lost shortly after, and when the plane didn’t come into land, a search was conducted. It was believed that the plane had crashed into Mount Tupungato in the Argentine Andes, but extensive search operations failed to find a wreckage.

The fate of the aircraft and its passengers remained a mystery right up until 1998, when two Argentine climbers found the remains of an aircraft engine at an elevation of 16,000 feet. Returning to the area in 2000, the Argentine army found more plane parts and even human remains, preserved by the cold. In the following years, 5 bodies were found and identified.

With further evidence, experts were able to deduce that Star Dust had unwittingly flown into a jet stream, slowing its flight speed down. The pilots, not realizing that they were in the jet stream, possibly due to malfunctioning equipment, appeared to have thought they were going faster than they actually were.

In doing so, it seems they believed that they’d already flown over the Andes, and began a descent directly into the mountains. Cloud-cover likely obscured Mount Tupangato until it was too late. The impact of the crash seemingly caused an avalanche, burying the wreckage, and over the years, the wreckage became incorporated into a glacier.

Now, as the glacier melts more each year, more debris is expected to be found in the future. But one mystery still remains. What did the Morse code message saying “STENDEC” mean? One theory suggests the pilot, in a state of oxygen deprivation, scrambled the letters of the word ‘DESCENT’.

However, it seems peculiar that he made the exact same spelling error in multiple separate messages. STENDEC may alternatively have been an obscure pilot acronym for the sentence, “Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending Emergency Crash-landing”.

But this doesn’t align with the rest of the message, which had reported the flight's estimated arrival time at the intended destination. As of yet, no single theory has been universally accepted for this final part of the mystery, and it may well remain buried in the snow forever.

Satellite Sleuth

There’s some incredible things to see on Google Earth, but if you know where to look, you can find some downright creepy stuff on there too.

One particular sight takes us back to November 7th, 1997, when William Moldt, a forty-year-old man from Lantana, Florida, failed to make it back home from a nightclub. A missing person’s investigation was launched, but with no success, the case went cold. It looked like the police would never find the man.

But on August 28th, 2019, 22 years after Moldt’s disappearance, police received reports of a car found in a pond in Wellington, Florida. The man who’d made the discovery had been exploring the area from above in Google Earth when he’d seen the unexpected sight on his monitor.

After sending his drone out to check that his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, he contacted the police, who managed to fish out the submerged vehicle. Inside the car were skeletal remains, later confirmed to be those of William Moldt himself.

It’s believed that after Moldt left the nightclub on November 7th, 1997, he’d drunkenly driven his car into the lake. Whether this was accidental or not remains unknown, but one thing’s for sure: he probably never expected his remains to be found by a dude sitting at home on his computer!

Anna Anderson Claims To Be Anastasia Nikolaevna

Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolavena of Russia was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, the last sovereign of Russia. During the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Tsar and his family were placed under house arrest by the rebelling Bolsheviks. Months later, on the night of July 16th, 1918, the Tsar’s and his family were executed in an act of political brutality.

In the years following the revolution, however, rumors began to emerge and solidify that Anastasia had actually survived her family’s execution. This wild conspiracy theory became world news in 1920, when a woman called Anna Anderson came forward claiming to be the princess herself.

She claimed she’d been living in exile since the revolution in 1918, and stuck to her story until her death in 1984. However, DNA testing in the 1990s eventually proved Anna was in no way related to the Russian royal family, nor any of their living descendants. She wasn’t even Russian! But that was far from the end of it.

Over the years, dozens of women have claimed to be the exiled Anastasia, and speculation around her true fate lasted until the end of the twentieth century. In 1991, researchers managed to locate the Tsar’s family’s burial ground, but, intriguingly, Anastasia’s body was nowhere in sight. That said, all conspiracy theories were finally quashed in 2008, when researchers returned to the site and found Anastasia’s corpse buried 200 feet away from the rest of her family.

With each family member’s identity confirmed with DNA testing, the fate of Anastasia was no longer in question. It’s not a particularly happy ending, but it finally solved one of the most famous mysteries of modern history.

A Familiar Face

On June 21, 1977, in Hau’ula, Hawaii, Charlotte Moriarty took her 6-month-old baby Marx Panama Moriarty-Barnes out for a walk in his stroller. She told Marx’s father, Mark Barnes, that she was just heading to the store. She never came back.

Charlotte ran away with her newborn son, leaving Mark wondering where they’d gone for the next 30 years. It was later revealed that Charlotte had been arrested shortly after departing, having broken into a stranger’s house, and lied about her and her baby’s names when questioned by the police.

Clearly mentally unwell, she was confined to a psychiatric hospital, but escaped a few days later. She hasn’t been seen since. Baby Marx, on the other hand, was sent to live in an orphanage, only 30 miles from his father’s home.

Marx, now called Steve Carter and hence untraceable by his father thanks to his mother’s use of fake names, was eventually adopted. With his new family in New Jersey, Steve had a comfortable upbringing, with no idea of what happened to him as a baby.

However, Steve still had a lot of questions about his childhood, and eventually he decided to do a bit of research into his past. Browsing through a missing children listing website one day in 2011, Steve stumbled across a profile for a certain Marx Panama Moriarty-Barnes. He was chilled to the core at how much the computer-generated age-progression photo of the baby looked like him.

Shocked, Steve went to the police and took a DNA test, which proved that he was indeed the missing boy. 33 years after his son’s disappearance, long after the final embers of hope had died down, Mark Barnes was finally reunited with his son Marx.

Only, now, he’d probably have to call him Steve. The emotions of the ordeal were, unsurprisingly, mixed for Steve. After all, it’s not every day you find yourself on a missing person’s register.

Zephany Nurse Case

Zephany Nurse was born in Cape Town, South Africa on April 28th, 1997, to Morné and Celeste Nurse. But when she was just 2 days old, Zephany was abducted from the hospital by a woman disguised in a nurse outfit.

Zephany’s parents tried everything they could to find their daughter, but when nothing ever came of their search, they were forced to accept the fact that they’d never see their baby again. A few years later, Morné and Celeste had another daughter, named Cassidy, and they finally felt like a normal family for a while.

In 2015, Cassidy started a new school, and soon became friends with a girl 4 years her senior named Miché Solomon. Cassidy had gotten to know Miché after their friends had pointed out their striking resemblance to each other, and their connection was instantaneous.

When Morné and Celeste Nurse heard about this similarity of appearances, they decided to investigate. They contacted the local police, who upon investigation, found that Miché’s parents couldn’t provide proof of their supposed daughter’s birth.

What’s more, DNA testing proved that Cassidy’s new friend Miché wasn’t just her friend; she was, in fact, her biological sister! Miché Solomon was actually Zephany Nurse, the baby who’d been missing for almost 20 years!

It turned out that the woman who’d kidnapped Zephany and raised her as her own had suffered a miscarriage days prior to the kidnapping, but had hidden that fact from her husband. Instead, she’d stolen Zephany and let her husband believe it was their real daughter. He never knew the truth, and neither did Zephany, until she happened to attend the same school as Cassidy Nurse.

The baby stealer was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison, and Zephany was, at last, reunited with her biological family. And you thought your family reunions were tough!

I hope you were amazed at these mysteries finally solved in unbelievable ways. Thanks for reading!