That region is very poverty-stricken, and meth is a horrible problem.
Ahem, the bolded part should have been: "She said she had decided to… " . Sorry about that.
Where I come from, the obvious candidate is Jack the Ripper. There was also a series of murders of women in areas close to the Thames in west London in the 1960s, though I believe the police thought they had identified the killer, who had conveniently killed himself before they could charge him.
Or there’s the mysterious disappearance of Victor Grayson
I do not think that wordmeans what you think it means.
You are not the first personto make such a mistake.
I live in a city where everybody knows everything about everybody. However, googling came up with this “Bizarro” case:
There is another famous crime linked to Johnny Galecki. Robert Marshall hired killers to kill his wife at a rest area on the Garden State Parkway.
Joe McGinnis wrote a book called* Blind Faith* about the case. It was made into an excellent miniseries starring Robert Urich as Marshall and Joanna Kerns as his wife. In my opinion it’s probably Urich’s best work. A large part of the story was how his son’s believed his story that they were attacked and robbed randomly but eventually became convinced that he had her killed. Johnny Galecki played one of the Marshall sons.
An interesting Hollywood side note: one of the sons Roby Marshall was a consultant on the mini-series. Joanna Kerns played his mother. She introduced him to Tracey Gold who played her daughter on Growing Pains. Marshall and Gold have been married since 1994 and have 4 sons.
For my home state, The Curious Case of Ed Gein. He turned dead bodies into furniture not more than 30 miles from where i grew up. He inspired at least two movies.
I was thinking he was spotted after someone saw the red light from his camcorder, but maybe that was a different weirdo.
Not unsolved, but both bizarre and awful – Bentley and Craig.
In short: in November 1952, while attempting to rob a warehouse in Croyden, South of London, Derek Bentley (aged 19) and Chris Craig (16) were spotted and the police called. Craig was armed with a pistol, Bentley with a knuckle duster. On the roof of the warehouse, Bentley was tackled by an officer, but broke free; the office then ordered Craig to “Hand over the gun, lad” and Bentley shouted (according to police witnesses), “Let him have it, Chris” – at which, Craig shot and wounded the officer, and subsequently shot and killed another.
Craig, who fired the shots, was too young to be executed (age limit 18).
The trial itself was hugely controversial – the meaning of “Let him have it, Chris” was unclear (either “shoot him” or “hand over the gun”), and Bentley and Craig denied that it had ever been said. Bentley’s mental age was such that it was debatable whether he was even fit to stand trial. Subsequently it was shown that Bentley’s “confession” had been, to say the least, “cleaned up” by the police. Bentley was hanged in 1953; his conviction was eventually overturned in 1998. This was one of the cases which led to the abolition of capital punishment in the UK.
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Four prostitutes murdered near Atlantic City. I had direct involvement in the investigation just prior to my retirement in 2007. It remains unsolved. I’m not sure who coined it the Eastbound Strangler but I suppose every sensational case needs a name. No one in the LE community refers to it as such.
A block from my house. The Jodi Huisentruit case. Morning news anchor (KIMT-TV) who never made it out of the parking lot of her apartment on her way to work one morning.
In this area, a couple of unsolved murders:
Thomas Wales, Assistant US Attorney, executed in 2001 while he worked from his basement home office in a quiet upscale neighborhood, shot through the window. Authorities have been pretty certain from the start who did it, but have been unable to prove it. Because of the high profile, it’s not like they haven’t devoted tons of resources to the case. There’s a $1 million reward.
A woman and her adult daughter went for a hike back in 2006. They were shot dead, with no useful clues left behind. The woman was a school librarian not far from me. People were afraid to go hiking for a very long time after this happened.
Notorious cases:
Green River Killer: I thought I’d go to my grave not knowing who he was, but he was finally caught and brought to justice.
This lunatic murdered a family of 4, the Goldmark family. The murderer believed right-wing wacko conspiracy theories that the husband was a Jewish commie sympathizer. Not only was he not Jewish or a commie sympathizer, he wasn’t even the right Goldmark. The killer was out to get Goldmark’s late father.
Ah, I did misunderstand the term, but I think it may be the same net effect in the long run. In this case, without the body, they may not have been able to say that a crime occurred (father lived far away, and the girlfriend said the victim just disappeared), but the amount of blood allowed the legal system to declare that a crime had been committed
In contrast to the disappearance of the 3 girls. No way to know what happened. Murder? Slavery? People fleeing from abuse?
Pennsylvania here. The disappearance of Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar is still completely unsolved. His cellphone and laptop were found (the laptop in a creek), but he was never seen again.
Another Arizona infamous case was the trial of Jodi Arias.
Australia is still looking for the cute kid in the spiderman suit Disappearance of William Tyrrell - Wikipedia
But long before him we lost the Beaumont children Disappearance of the Beaumont children - Wikipedia
And I lived close enough to Eloise that our house was searched as part of the investigation along with all our neighbours Disappearance of Eloise Worledge - Wikipedia rumours were they found a lot of cannabis plants but no Eloise
Karmein Chan was found near my current home but didn’t make the news quite so big because she wasn’t white Murder of Karmein Chan - Wikipedia
I live very close to the sites of the Jack the Ripper murders, but obvs everyone knows about them, and they’ve already been mentioned.
My Grandmother was murdered on Lambeth Bridge in 1977. (I’m not traumatised - I was a baby, and I’ve talked about it on the Straight Dope before), beaten to death. “Murder by person or persons unknown” is the cause of death on the certificate. It’s not bizarre, really - she was a penniless, homeless alcoholic in her sixties and probably just met some Clockwork Orange-Style bastards who kicked her until they got bored - but it is unsolved and obviously very local to me. I suppose it is a little bizarre because as far as I know she wouldn’t have had any enemies so there’s no obvious motive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ColdCaseUK/comments/dr0tv5/the_unsolved_murder_of_michaela_hague/
Local to me was the murder of Michaela Hague on bonfire night 2001. Reddit has a good write up.
I read that book, and Investigation Discovery recently did a program about it. I didn’t know he had died; what a tragic story.
It gets worse.
He was adopted by a second family after he got out of prison, who were inspired to do so after the mother read the book, and they were probably worse than his bio parents! He also changed to his wife’s name when he got married; they divorced shortly before he died.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/73337868/lawrence-j_-swartz
I first heard of a story like this in the early 1980s, from one of those Obnoxious Morning Deejays.
This happened just a few days before I was scheduled to leave (and did) on a Girl Scout bus trip, where we would be tent camping. We went to our equivalent of a Jamboree, in Tennessee. A suspect was arrested and tried, but acquitted, and it doesn’t look like he did it (he died 2 years later).
As for Jodi Huisentruit, I have always believed that the killer is a man 30 years her senior who was aggressively pursuing her, and she was not interested in a romantic relationship with him. Last I heard, he lived in the Southwest and wouldn’t speak to reporters.