True Crime Historical Records
About this ebook series
Haunting Cold Cases of Unidentified Bodies, Vanished Victims & Killers Who Were Never Caught
True Crime Historical Records
This series can be read in any order
A quick word of warning. The cases in this collection are not neat mysteries with tidy endings. Most documentaries and news segments give you the highlight reel and move on. In my books, I don't do that. I follow the case files, the coroner's reports, the years of dead-end leads and wasted tips, all the way to wherever they actually go - even when that means no name, no arrest, and no closure. Some of these cases were solved decades after the fact by genetic genealogy nobody could have predicted. Others remain open today, the file still sitting on a detective's desk. What you're about to read will make you question how anyone can simply vanish, or die, without the world ever learning who they were.
A sampling of the 20 cases includes:
The Pyjama Girl – A woman's body is found burned beyond recognition in a culvert in rural Australia. It takes a decade, a public viewing of her preserved corpse, and a disputed identification to close the case - and even then, doubts remain.
The Isdal Woman – A hiker finds a burned body in a Norwegian valley. The woman had filed the serial numbers off everything she owned and left behind a coded notebook. Decades later, isotope analysis reveals she wasn't who anyone thought.
The Somerton Man – A well-dressed man is found dead on an Adelaide beach with no identification, only a scrap of poetry sewn into his pocket reading "Tamám Shud" - The End. It takes 74 years and a DNA exhumation to even attempt an answer.
The Boy in the Box – A child's battered body is discovered in a cardboard box in a Philadelphia suburb. For sixty years, thousands of leads go nowhere, until a genetic genealogy breakthrough finally gives him back his name.
Bear Brook – Two barrels in the New Hampshire woods hold the remains of a woman and three children. No one reports them missing. No one knows who they are. Then investigators realize a fifth victim - very much alive - has been walking around using another man's identity for decades.
The Beaumont Children – Three siblings walk to an Australian beach and are never seen again. Witnesses place them with a strange man. Six decades, thousands of tips, and one persistent suspect later, the case still isn't closed.
The Circleville Letters – For over a decade, an anonymous writer terrorizes a small Ohio town with letters that know too much. When one victim tries to expose the writer, it costs him his life - and the letters keep coming.
The Sodder Children – A house fire on Christmas Eve kills five children - or does it? Their mother spends the rest of her life convinced they were taken before the flames ever reached them, and the evidence she gathered still doesn't add up.
Included in this volume:
Carmen Colón, Wanda Walkowicz, Michelle Maenza, Linda Agostini, Carl Webb, Ingeborg Kristiansen (Isdal Woman), Terry Rasmussen, Marlyse Honeychurch, Marie Vaughn, Sarah McWaters, Jane Boroski, Debbie Warner, Patricia Kalitzke, Robert Piché, Grant Beaumont, Jane Beaumont, Arnna Beaumont, Sheila Lyon, Katherine Lyon, Lloyd Welch, Maura Murray, Brandon Swanden, Asha Degree, Sherri Farmer, Suzanne Streeter, Stacy McCall, Debbie Sue Williams, Sheila Lambert, John and Georgia Sodder, Gemma Doty, Marion Kruse, Michael and Melissa Chamberlain, David Meirhofer
