These Unsolved Mysteries Plagued the Internet, & So We Decided to Look Into the Details of Each One

The Yuba County Five, a group of five men, were driving home from a California basketball game in February 1978. They were reported missing when they didn’t return home for several days. During a police search, their undamaged car was found 70 miles away from the game they’d attended.

It wasn’t until June that their bodies were discovered in a 20-mile radius around the car. One of them had frozen to death, three had been eaten by wild animals, and one — Gary Mathias — has never been found.

In January 1966, three children of the Beaumont family — all less than 10 — went to the beach to celebrate Australia Day with their mother’s permission. They’d gone to the beach by themselves before without incident. They were supposed to return by 2 P.M. that day. By 7:30 P.M., they were still gone.

After the children were reported missing, a search that involved hundreds of police officers was conducted, but they were never found. The disappearance of the Beaumont children remains one of Australia’s most infamous cold cases.

May 2008 — Brandon Swanson, 19, was driving home at night but accidentally drove into a ditch. He called his parents to get him, claiming to be stuck near Lynd, Minnesota. His parents stayed on the phone as they came to find him until Brandon shouted a swear word over the phone and went silent.

When the police got involved, they found Brandon’s car near Porter, Minnesota. The car was undamaged, but Brandon was missing, with even sniffer dogs unable to find him. No one knows what really happened to him.

In 1992, Suzie Streeter and Stacy McCall had graduated high school and were leaving a party at 2:15 A.M. They planned to visit a water park the next day and decided to stay at Suzie’s house that night with her mother, Sherill.

The girls never showed up at the park, and their friends came over the next day to investigate. The house door was unlocked, the home devoid of any of the women. Their cars and personal belongings were still present. Nobody knows where the Springfield Three vanished.

In 2009, Susan Powell stayed home alone while her husband and two children went camping. When they returned, Susan had vanished, leaving only a note in her safe deposit box that read, “If I die, it may not be an accident.”

Susan was never found, and her husband Josh was a suspect, but was never arrested. In 2012, Josh took the lives of both himself and his children just before he was supposed to take a judge-ordered polygraph test. Though suspicious, no one can prove Josh was guilty.

Everyone knows about the Zodiac Killer. This mysterious criminal murdered five people in the late ’60s but claimed to have killed 37 people. He even taunted police in San Francisco by sending them encrypted letters. Sometimes, he even reported his own crimes.

In 1974, the Zodiac Killer stopped communicating with the police, and no one knows why. Did he die? Choose to stop pushing his luck? Move to another country? No one knows for sure, and the Zodiac Killer remains one of America’s most infamous unknown serial killers.

In 2006, Robert Wone was staying overnight at the house of Joseph Prince, a friend who lived with two other men, Dylan Ward and Victor Zaborsky. That night, the men claimed to find Wone dead in the guest bedroom, with three stab wounds.

The men had recently showered before police arrived, and all three were suspects. Though arrested at the time, the three men were found not guilty in 2010. It’s believed that they know who killed Wone, but they can’t be proven as the murderers.

In 1982, seven people in Chicago died after being poisoned with cyanide from tampered bottles of Tylenol. A lot of pharmaceuticals were pulled off the shelves, and the murders spurred significantly greater security measures for drugs from then on.

A man named James Lewis had written an extortion letter to Johnson and Johnson, demanding money in exchange for stopping the killings, but there’s no direct evidence that Lewis did it. He did get arrested for attempted extortion, but he could have just been an opportunistic fool, not a murderer.

In 1945, the Sodder family, comprised of the parents and nine children, went to bed on Christmas Eve. Five children shared beds in the attic. Around 1 A.M., a large fire consumed the home. The parents and four of the children escaped, but those in the attic didn’t.

The father tried to help them, but his ladder was mysteriously missing, and the house burned down without the five children being rescued. Oddly, their remains could not be found in the follow-up investigation — not even their bones were found.

Russell and Shirley Dermond were an elderly couple who lived in a wealthy Georgia community. In 2014, after being absent for some time, concerned neighbors visited the Dermond house to check on them. What they found was horrific — the house was unlocked, and Russell’s decapitated body was found inside the garage.

10 days later, Shirley’s body was found in Lake Oconee, weighed down by cinderblocks. No one knows who did this brutal crime… or why. The barbaric murder of this elderly couple remains unsolved.

It’s 2007. The McCann family is on vacation in Portugal. The parents, Gerry and Kate, go to dinner with their friends — leaving three-year-old Madeleine in a hotel. The adults decided to regularly check on their children using a rotation system.

When Kate went to check, Madeleine was missing. A search was conducted by police, border patrol, hotel staff, and more, but the young Madeleine McCann could not be located. After a hundred days, it was acknowledged that the girl was unlikely to ever be found alive.

In the late ’80s and ’90s, a horrible man that no one could identify attacked and abducted women and young girls throughout Melbourne, Australia. This unidentified man went by the name “Mr. Cruel.” Despite police knowing where many of his crime scenes were, Mr. Cruel has never been identified.

That’s because the monster left no forensic evidence at any of his crime scenes. To this day, the composite sketch you can see above is the only chilling indicator of what Mr. Cruel may have looked like.

It’s 1997. Steve and Marlene Aisenberg tuck their three children into bed, including five-month-old Sabrina Aisenberg. The next day, Marlene was getting her oldest son out of bed when she noticed that their garage door and the door connecting the garage to the house were both wide open.

Panicking, she ran into Sabrina’s room to check on her, only to find the infant girl missing. There was a huge search conducted by law enforcement, but despite all of this effort, Sabrina was never found.

On December 26th, 1996, JonBenét Ramsey, a six-year-old beauty queen, was reported missing from her home in Boulder, Colorado. In the home was a handwritten ransom note. Seven hours after the girl was reported missing, she was found in the basement of her own home, strangled to death.

No one was ever charged for the crime or arrested. Who killed JonBenét Ramsey? A home intruder? A family member? Why was there a ransom note? Even now, the demise of that poor girl remains shrouded in mystery.

December 30th, 2000. In the Setagaya neighborhood of Tokyo, the Miyazawa family, consisting of two parents and two children, are murdered in their own home.

The mystery here is the strange behavior of the murderer — reports say the murderer raided the family kitchen, surfed the internet on their computer, and may have even napped on their sofa, all after the heinous act. The worst part is, no arrest has ever been made, despite both the killer’s blood and fingerprints being recovered from the scene of the crime.

In 2014, Lars Mittank was on a trip to Bulgaria with his friends. After sustaining an injury, he stayed behind instead of taking his flight back home. Shortly after, Mittank made a frightening call to his mother from his hotel room, claiming that people were coming to kill him.

Mittank tried to go to the airport to get out of Bulgaria but panicked in the terminal and sprinted out and into some nearby woods. Since then, no one has laid eyes on him. He’s been missing ever since.

In 2014, a Malaysia Airlines flight with 12 crew and 227 passengers going from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared without a trace. The plane’s transponder stopped sending out location data in Vietnam; then it made a sharp left turn toward the Malay Peninsula.

Afterward, authorities lost track of the aircraft and no one has been able to find it since. That an entire airline went missing and has yet to be found is mind-boggling. But it had to land somewhere, and our guess would be the deep ocean.

In 2006, Brian Shaffer, a university student, went into a bar called the Ugly Tuna Saloona around 2 A.M. He was seen on cameras around that time speaking to two women in the bar but walked out of the camera’s sight afterward. Brian Shaffer was never seen again.

The bar did have another exit besides the main entrance, but it led to a construction site. We hate to speculate about something horrible, but we wouldn’t be surprised if that construction site was tied to Brian’s death somehow.

Below is the last footage seen of Elisa Lam in a hotel elevator, who was reported missing on February 1st, 2013. In this video, Elisa Lam seemed panicked. Sometime after she disappeared, guests in the hotel complained about murky water coming from their faucets.

An employee went up to check on the hotel’s water tanks, only to find Elisa dead inside one of them. No one is sure how Elisa got there. She did have bipolar disorder, so it could have been an accident, but no one is sure.

D.B. Cooper boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 305 in 1971. Once airborne, Cooper revealed that he had a bomb, and demanded $200,000 cash and four parachutes for when the plane landed. The FBI gathered these, and when the plane landed, Cooper allowed the passengers and some crew to leave.

Once he had his money, Cooper ordered the aircraft to take off and chart a course for Mexico City. On the way there, between Seattle and Nevada, Cooper leaped from the plane with his money. 45 years later, Cooper remains unlocated.

In 1947, Elizabeth Short, also known as “Black Dahlia,” was found dead in Los Angeles with horrific injuries. She had been cut in half and almost completely drained of blood. All of her wounds were caused with surgical precision.

Later, a suicide note allegedly written by the murderer was found in a pile of clothing, claiming that he was taking his own life because he was too cowardly to turn himself in. An investigation turned up no evidence of who may have written the note.

Jack the Ripper may be an old mystery, but he’s a mystery nonetheless. This serial murderer took the lives of at least five women, and may have killed up to eleven in 1888. He taunted Scotland Yard about his horrific acts, but no one was ever able to identify who he may have been.

By now, it’s too late for anyone to discover who this madman was. Even so, people today still speculate about this infamous serial killer, fascinated by his madness and the mystery that surrounds him.

March 31, 1922. Six residents of the Hinterkaifeck farm in Germany are murdered with a pickaxe. All six are piled on top of one another in the barn afterward. Allegedly, the murderer proceeded to live in their farmhouse for six days after that. Coincidentally, the family had believed their farm was haunted…

Ultimately, no one was ever charged or convicted for the murders. Before the time of DNA forensics, a murderer could easily get away with their crime as long as they made themselves scarce before law enforcement arrived.

In December 1872, a British ship named Mary Celeste was found abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was completely intact and seaworthy, and it still had all of its cargo onboard. The only thing missing was the lifeboats and the crew that had presumably left on them.

Why was the ship abandoned? Where did the crew go? There’s no way for anyone today to know, as nobody from that crew was ever seen or heard from again. It’s one of the great unsolved maritime mysteries.

We all know about Tupac? He was shot in 1996 in Las Vegas, and no one knows who did it. The young legend was unable to identify his assailant to the police before losing consciousness, and he died in the hospital not long after.

Kadafi, a member of Tupac’s entourage at the time, claimed to have been able to identify the assailants. But Kadafi was murdered two months after the shooting that took Tupac’s life, before he could be interviewed. Maybe he really did know something?

In 1976, residents of Circleville, Ohio, started receiving threatening letters from Columbus with no return address. The letters threatened individuals in the town over a supposed extramarital affair, and one of the threatened individuals even died a very suspicious death not long after.

Paul Freshour was convicted of writing the letters and jailed, but even after that, the threatening letters kept coming. Freshour himself even received one in prison. The letters continued to come throughout the ’80s and ’90s, but the real sender remains a mystery.

Starting in 1918, New Orleans was plagued by a wild killer known as the “Axeman.” He only attacked at night and was allegedly responsible for six murders. This killer only attacked people in their sleep, used tools found in the victim’s home, and seemed to specifically target Italian Americans.

There are many theories about the Axeman’s motivations, even going so far as to think he was trying to promote jazz music, but to this day, no one knows who he was or what his motivations were.

In 1957, near Philadelphia, the body of a six-year-old boy was found in a box. He was clean and wrapped in a blanket, but also had several small incisions indicative of a medical procedure. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.

The boy was kept in a morgue while visitors from ten different states tried to identify him. 400,000 flyers were sent out by police, and the American Medical Association tried to identify him too. But even now, the boy remains unidentified.

November 29th, 1981. Around 7:30 A.M., famous actress Natalie Wood is found drowned in the Pacific Ocean just off Catalina Island. She’d been with her husband Robert Wagner and Christoper Walken just the night before on a yacht, where she had gone to bed before the others.

When her husband came to kiss her goodnight, Wood was missing, and discovered by the Coast Guard later in the Pacific Ocean. She had been drinking before, so did she stumble off of the ship in a drunken haze, or…?

April 12, 1981. In Keddie, California, the Sharp family and friends went to bed inside Cabin 28 at the Keddie Resort Lodge. The following day, Sheila Sharp awoke to find her mother, her brother, and a friend murdered in the cabin, and her 12-year-old sister was missing.

Sheila survived because she had been sleeping at a friend’s cabin. Oddly, Sheila’s two younger brothers, who had been sleeping in another room in Cabin 28, were unharmed. The remains of the missing sister were found later, but no killer was ever caught.

In March of 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston became the victim of an art theft, with the value of the stolen pieces worth around $500 million. The thieves disguised themselves as police and managed to trick the guards into letting them inside.

No one is sure who the thieves were, and the art they stole is still missing, though there’s a $10 million reward for any information that actually leads to their recovery. That art is probably resting with some despots out there somewhere.

If you know about Jimmy Hoffa, you know he was involved with the mob. He was also the president of Teamsters, a driver’s labor union. In 1976, the largest Teamsters pension fund lost millions of dollars, and two weeks after that, Hoffa disappeared.

Was Hoffa the one who stole the money? It’s unclear, but it’s believed that he was murdered by other mobsters. That said, Hoffa’s body has never been found, and there’s no evidence as to who his killer really was.

January 22nd, 1935. A man named Roland T. Owen checked into the Hotel President in Kansas City, Missouri. For several days, Owen behaved oddly but didn’t cause problems. On January 4th, Owen was discovered with horrible injuries and blood all over his room.

When asked who hurt him, Owen said nobody and that it wasn’t a suicide attempt. He went comatose on the way to the hospital and died there shortly thereafter. Later, his true identity was revealed to be Artemus Ogletree. What happened to him is still a mystery.

It’s 1935, and the Coogee Aquarium is having a rough time. The owner’s son caught a 14-foot Tiger shark, and felt it would make a great attraction during tough times. It did, until that shark regurgitated a human arm. Police identified the arm’s owner as Jimmy Smith, who’d been missing.

Smith had been involved with some shady businessmen, running insurance scams. He’d last been seen playing cards with Patrick Francis Brady in a hotel. It’s believed Patrick was involved with Smith’s death, but that can’t be confirmed.

Anyone who has read an American history book knows about this one. In 1587, English colonial governor John White led some colonists to found a British colony on Roanoke Island. When supplies ran low, White had to return to England to restock.

When White returned three years later, the colony was abandoned, with all infrastructure intact or carefully dismantled. The only hint about the colonists’ whereabouts had gone was the word “Croatoan” carved into a post. No one has ever confirmed what happened to the colonists.

December 12th, 1910. Socialite Dorothy Arnold leaves her Manhattan home to head downtown and buy an evening dress. During her trip, she ran into a friend, Gladys, and had a normal conversation. After the two parted ways, Dorothy was never seen again.

There’s no evidence regarding what happened to Dorothy Arnold. No trace of her has ever been found by private investigators or police. Did she get abducted? Simply decide to find a different life to live? There’s no way for anyone to know at this point.

Bugsy Siegel grew up a career criminal in New York. He eventually worked for the mob but tried to cheat that mob out of a lot of money while working for them. Costing them millions, the said mob was not very happy with Bugsy.

On June 20th, 1947, Bugsy Siegel sat on a couch in Virginia Hill, in California. Around 11 A.M., nine shots from a nearby pergola sitting around 14 feet away were fired at the mobster, killing him. There’s no concrete evidence that the mob took him out, but it’s the prevailing theory.

Just about everyone in America knows about the OJ case. Maybe the gloves didn’t fit, but all of the circumstantial evidence seems to indicate that he did it. Even some OJ’s supporters believe he actually killed Nicole Brown.

But the fact is, it can’t be proven in court, so we’ll never know. But unlike a lot of the other unsolved mysteries on this list, this one is still relatively new, and people can ponder whether or not a guilty murderer walks free.

This unsolved mystery errs a bit more on the side of the supernatural. Since the 1950s, more than fifty dogs have died jumping off of Overtoun Bridge in Scotland, and hundreds more have leaped off of the thing from the same spot… and almost always on sunny days.

Scientifically, nobody has any clue why dogs do this, specifically at Overtoun Bridge. Is it haunted? Is there some scent or sound luring them over the edge? Either way, this unsolved mystery is both interesting and harrowing.

On March 10th, 1928, nine-year-old Walter Collins left home alone to go see a movie and never returned. For months, no one could find him. Then, the police picked up a boy claiming to be Walter in Illinois. He was brought back to Walter’s mother, Christine, but she swore the boy wasn’t Walter despite looking like him.

Christine was institutionalized for allegedly being crazy, but later, “Walter” admitted that he was someone else entirely. As for what happened to the real Walter Collins, that still remains unsolved.

Who hasn’t heard of this one? In March of 1997, a group of five lights in a V formation appeared in the night sky above Phoenix, Arizona. Hundreds of people supposedly saw them, describing the lights as silent and part of a large but difficult-to-identify silhouette.

Obviously, many people believe they were UFOs. Many others think they were top-secret military aircraft. Ultimately, though, there has never been any confirmation, so we don’t really know. The mystery of the Phoenix Lights remains unsolved.

In 1951, Mary Reeser fell asleep in a chair in her apartment after taking some sedatives. A few hours later, a landlord who smelled smoke busted down Reeser’s door, only to find that the woman had been practically cremated, save for one foot.

Most of the apartment was unscathed, including the very chair that Reeser had been sitting in when she supposedly burned alive. How is that possible? To this day, some people believe she was a victim of spontaneous combustion, but this can’t be definitely proven.

Alcatraz is an infamous prison that rests on an island, once considered impossible to escape. But inmates Clarence Anglin, John Anglin, Allen West, and Frank Morris would do just that. We won’t go into the details of the escape, as those are well-known.

How these inmates escaped is known. The unsolved part of this case is what happened to them. After the inmates got on a raft to escape Alcatraz by water, they were never seen again. Did they escape or drown? No one knows.

In December of 1946, 18-year-old Paula Jean Welden told her roommate that she was going to take a long walk. After departing, Paula never returned to the domicile. Lots of strange leads came up over the years about her disappearance. One man even bragged that he knew where her body was.

But despite all of this, Paula was never found. No body, no clues, no nothing. Paula just seemingly up and vanished from the Earth, leaving this as yet another unsolved cold case in world history.

In 1900, there was a lighthouse off the coast of Scotland that was supposed to be manned by three men. On December 15th, a ship passed by, noting that the lighthouse was not active. On December 26th, another ship passed by, and saw the Scottish flag missing from the flagpole.

Going ashore to investigate, the captain couldn’t find any lighthouse keepers. Their beds were made, and all the clocks in the lighthouse were stopped. The keepers were never found, making this yet another eerie unsolved mystery.