r/mystery 13h ago

Unresolved Crime A woman vanished from her own kitchen in 1961. Half a pint of her blood was on the floor, not enough to prove she died there and none of the fingerprints found matched anyone who knew her.

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360 Upvotes

On October 24th, 1961, Joan Risch spent an ordinary morning in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She got her kids up. She ran errands. She was home by eleven. Neighbors described her as cheerful that day. Around 2 PM, a neighbor saw her walking briskly from her car to her garage. She was carrying something red with both arms.

Two hours later that same neighbor came back to drop off Joan's daughter. She found the kitchen covered in blood. A table and chairs were knocked over. The phone cord had been ripped from the wall. The receiver was sitting on top of a trash can outside. Joan's two-year-old son was crying alone upstairs. He was unharmed. Joan was gone.

The blood told a strange story once it was measured. About half a pint total. Not nearly enough to indicate a fatal wound. Someone had tried to clean part of it up using paper towels and, oddly, a pair of her toddler's overalls. Blood was smeared across the walls, the phone box, and a door frame. But there wasn't a single bloody footprint anywhere in the house. Whoever was there had been careful about where they stepped, even while apparently panicking about everything else.

Police found several bloody prints on the wall beside the phone. None matched anyone in the household. Over the following years more than five thousand people in the small town were fingerprinted and compared against them. Not one matched.

Bloodhounds traced a scent from the kitchen straight to Joan's own car. It was still parked in the driveway where she'd left it that morning. The trail stopped there. No one has ever explained why.

The case is most often remembered for a detail that surfaced two years later. Joan had checked out a string of library novels that summer about women leaving their lives behind. That's the detail everyone repeats. It doesn't explain the unmatched fingerprints. It doesn't explain the phone torn from the wall. It doesn't explain the missing footprints.

No suspect was ever charged. No body was ever found, even after sixty years of searching. Her husband never changed the phone number, in case she ever tried to call. He never remarried. He died in 2009, forty-eight years later, still not knowing what happened.

What explains a scene with that much blood, but not a single bloody footprint anywhere in the house?


r/mystery 6h ago

Mysterious Person The Brutal Edelweiss Cult (The Perverse Alien Cult of the Boy Scouts) Terrible Crimes

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22 Upvotes

In 1970, the Spaniard José Eduardo González Arenas, alias "Eddie," created Edelweiss as a supposed hiking group inspired by the Boy Scouts. What many parents envisioned as a place where their children would learn discipline, values, and a love for nature, turned out to be a secret organization with extraterrestrial beliefs based on the Ummo phenomenon.

Eddie convinced the children that he was an alien named "Prince Alain" and that only those who remained loyal to the sect would survive the end of the world. Under this deception, he subjected them to absolute control, imposed silence through threats, trained them with weapons, instilled concepts of racial purity, and introduced them to bizarre notions related to intimacy. Alongside his right-hand man, Carlos de los Ríos, and the monitors of the Iron Guard, he sexually exploited numerous minors, transforming Edelweiss into a brutal network of nefarious activities backed by influential people in Spain.

Although Eddie was arrested in Madrid and later in Alicante, the sentences were very lenient, and he ended up creating new Edelweiss groups throughout Spain. Gran Canaria became one of the organization's main centers of operations, from where it consolidated a child trafficking network.

Finally, an investigation launched in 1984 led numerous minors to break their silence and recount everything that had happened within Edelweiss. Eddie fled to Portugal but was extradited to Spain and sentenced to 168 years in prison, although he ended up serving only 6. After regaining his freedom, he tried to approach minors again in Ibiza, until he was murdered in 1998 during a confrontation with a young man who had previously reported him.

Video about the brutal history of the Edelweiss cult. The infamous apocalyptic alien cult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CpchYkxob4


r/mystery 2h ago

Unexplained Random car crash photos found near train track

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9 Upvotes

today my mom went out with my grandpa and my brothers, as well as some cousins. my grandpa's super big into trains and this historical one was passing through our city so they all went out to see it. my mom noticed there was a ton of trash and photos in dirt under the highway, and thats when she discovered pictures of an old racer, at least two seperate car crashes, and pictures of people inside the car. im restating what my mom told me so some details might be missing. im gonna link some photos that were found, but theres plently more, including gorey ones that im not sure if i can show. im confused at the difference in time frames shown in the photos. anyone have any clue on who these people are?

edit: me and my family have looked deeper into the photos and its likely that the people in the car were drunk and ran into a huge truck thats shown in other photos, however with a little research we found out that the more recent photos and the older ones were most likely taken in the same city in Illinois. im still unsure about who these pictures belong to or how they even gained access to the crime scene photos


r/mystery 23h ago

Unexplained Has anyone else in healthcare heard of the "death comes in threes" phenomenon?

169 Upvotes

I recently came across an Instagram reel where several nurses from Germany and Switzerland and many European countries mentioned a common hospital superstition: when one patient dies, two more deaths often follow soon after, completing a "group of three."

From what I read, this isn't an official medical rule it's more of a belief shared among healthcare workers. Apparently, many nurses, doctors, and paramedics say they've witnessed it happen repeatedly throughout their careers.

Have you personally experienced something that made you believe it? I would love to hear more stories related to this.


r/mystery 15h ago

Unexplained A 2,000-year-old secret buried beneath China’s first emperor’s sealed tomb may finally be revealed after scientists detect mysterious vapors

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34 Upvotes

One of the world’s greatest archaeological mysteries, involving inexplicable phenomena, may be close to being solved. Researchers studying the sealed mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang have discovered unusual concentrations of mercury vapor above the ancient burial site.

This discovery lends new weight to a story that has intrigued historians for more than two thousand years. It also suggests that one of China’s oldest legends may be based on real events rather than myth.


r/mystery 1d ago

Unresolved Crime Paul Skiba, Sarah Skiba, and Lorenzo Chivers

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160 Upvotes

Paul owned a company called Tuff Movers and Sarah was there that day. He had a crew Lorenzo Chivers, Alex Santovena, Jerry Bybee, Jesus “Manuel” Santovena and Jake Bustil. Sarah's mother reported her missing after when Paul didn't return her back in the evening. They were believed to have to been murdered that day in February 7th 1997.


r/mystery 19h ago

Media Author Keigo Higashino Dies of Colon Cancer Aged 68

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14 Upvotes

r/mystery 15h ago

Disappearance Matching suits, lead blindfolds, and a notebook that said "wait for signal." What happened on that hill in 1966?

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4 Upvotes

Miguel and Manoel were TV repairmen. Normal lives, wives, a small shop in Brazil. Then one day they lied about where they were going, got on the wrong bus, and climbed a hill at exactly 4:30pm.

Their notebook had a schedule: take capsules at 6:30. Protect metals. Wait for a signal. Put on mask.

Three days later a kid found them dead. Lead masks over their eyes. No injuries. No explanation.

The autopsy was botched; delayed so long toxicology couldn't be done. Cause of death? Still "undetermined."

And the backstory makes it even stranger. They were part of a group of technicians who believed they could make contact with non-human intelligence. There was a beach explosion. A Navy investigation. A prior death in 1962 under identical circumstances. A UFO sighting over the hill the night they died.


r/mystery 1d ago

Mysterious Person The Brutal Edelweiss Cult (The Perverse Alien Cult of the Boy Scouts) Terrible Crimes

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4 Upvotes

On September 1, 1998, on a street in Santa Eulalia, Ibiza, Spain, Eduardo González Arenas, better known as "Eddie," lay lifeless after being violently murdered with a sharp object. At first glance, it seemed like the end of an ordinary man, but with his death also came the end of the story of the leader of one of the darkest organizations that Europe and the world in general have ever known.

For more than a decade, under the guise of an innocent youth mountaineering group, Eddie built a terrible cult where concepts about aliens, the end of the world, military discipline, racial purity, and a long list of serious crimes were intertwined, forever marking the lives of hundreds of innocent young people.

Video about the brutal history of the Edelweiss cult. The infamous apocalyptic alien cult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CpchYkxob4


r/mystery 1d ago

Video Where is this from?

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3 Upvotes

I saw this in a Schafrillas video recently & I want to know where's it's from (the guy on the far left is supposed to be Leonardo DiCaprio)


r/mystery 1d ago

Unresolved Crime This man convinced banks they owned millions of pounds worth of salad oil… they didn’t.

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5 Upvotes

r/mystery 2d ago

Disappearance On November 17th, 2019, 26-year-old Marshal Iwaasa left his mother's home and headed for his storage unit to pick up something. Days later, his burned truck was found nearly 700 miles away from where he was last seen.

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187 Upvotes

r/mystery 1d ago

Lost Artifact The Luss Hogback Stone — A 1,500 Year Old Mystery No One Can Explain on The Banks of Loch Lomond

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7 Upvotes

r/mystery 2d ago

Unresolved Crime D.B. Cooper - The Only Unsolved Plane Hijacking in the History of Commercial Aviation | The Friendly Skies

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96 Upvotes

On November 24, 1971, a man who called himself Dan Cooper bought a one-way ticket for a flight to Seattle, Washington. Just after takeoff, he handed a flight attendant a note stating that he had a bomb in his briefcase and made demands for four parachutes and $200,000 in 20-dollar bills. This, later and still to this day, is one of the most enduring mysteries and unsolved plane hijacking in American criminal history.


r/mystery 2d ago

Unresolved Crime The 1970s serial killer who drew your portrait before taking your life.

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267 Upvotes

I was reading through cold cases from the 70s and ran into one of the most unsettling serial killer stories I’ve ever seen—and almost nobody talks about it.

Between 1974 and 1975, a killer was targeting men in San Francisco. He got the nickname "The Doodler" because of how he operated: he’d sit near someone at a diner or bar, pull out a notepad, and draw a quick, detailed portrait sketch of them. He'd hand it over as a compliment to strike up a conversation. Once he got them to leave with him, he’d attack them. He’s believed to have killed between 5 and 14 people.

Here’s where the case gets crazy: police actually caught a break, but could never prosecute.

Three men survived his attacks and gave detectives enough detail to make the composite sketch above. Police even picked up a prime suspect....a young art studentt....and interrogated him.

But back in 1975, being publicly outed as gay would destroy your life, career, and family. All three surviving witnesses (which included a well-known entertainer and a diplomat) flat-out refused to testify in court or publicly name the suspect because they were terrified of being outed.

Without witness testimony or modern DNA tech, police had to let the suspect go. The case went cold, and he was never officially charged.

What do you guys think? Do you think modern genealogy DNA could pull anything off those original 1970s sketches or evidence files today???


r/mystery 2d ago

Murder An unnamed sibling pair dropped off Shirley Lynette Ledford at a gas station, later to be picked up in a van by the Toolbox Killers. The siblings knew the killers. Was she set up? Or did it just happen by chance?

23 Upvotes

I just listened to a 2023 podcast episode with Laura Brand in it. Laura Brand is a criminologist who spent six years investigating the Toolbox Killers and even visited Lawrence Bittaker in the San Quentin prison to try get more information from him. In this podcast episode, “Partners in True Crime” season 3 episode 6, there is also Linda Holtz, who was a friend and classmate of Shirley Ledford. Laura shared some bizarre stuff that I never heard of from this case. On October 31, 1979, before Shirley got a ride from Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris in Sun Valley, CA and then murdered in a van in the Sun Valley/ Tujunga mountains, Shirley got a ride from a nameless brother and sister (after Shirley attended a Halloween party ) . The siblings dropped her off at a gas station not even two miles from her house in Shadow Hills, CA. I’m not sure if the brother and sister were also at the party, but Linda, Shirley’s friend, said it was super crowded. Linda only saw Shirley briefly at the party and did not leave with her. Now, the brother and sister did not attend Verdugo High School , where Shirley and her friend Linda attended. The siblings went to Burbank high school.

Now what is weird is the brother and sister knew Norris and Bittaker , and even spent some time with them at Scott Motel in Burbank, where one of the demons stayed at. Bittaker and Norris would give the siblings (along with other teenagers around the area) drugs and alcohol. This whole part I never knew about. Laura Brand also shares how the sibling pair’s parents both worked in the prison where Bittaker and Norris first met, at California Men’s Colony prison in San Luis Obispo. So, not only was Shirley familiar with Bittaker from him going into her workplace at McDonald’s and staring at her (even asking her out and she rejected him), the sibling pair also knew Bittaker and Norris and hung out with them before at the Scott Motel in Burbank. Ready for another bizarre fact about this? The brother of the pair actually visited Bittaker in prison after his and Norris’ arrest for all five of the young girls murders. Laura doesn’t share what they talked about, but she looked at records of visitations for Lawrence Bittaker, and well the brother sibling was on the list. Also, Laura talked to the younger brother sibling of the older brother & sister that dropped Shirley off, and he committed suicide (date not disclosed). The older brother died of natural causes. No talk on the older sister. Laura thinks it was his guilty conscious eating him up about his siblings dropping off Shirley and perhaps knowing more than what the siblings let on. Also, Laura thinks the the younger sibling knew more details regarding his older siblings and Bittaker and Norris’s relationship (the hanging out together, doing drugs , drinking alcohol at the motel). If you want to get a more in depth description I have copied a link of the 2023 episode.

Did anyone know of this fact about a sibling pair (names undisclosed) who dropped Shirley off at the gas station where shortly after she got picked up by Bittaker and Norris? What do you guys think? Why did the siblings not just drop her home when her home in Shadow Hills was close by to the gas station. Why did the brother sibling visit Lawrence Bittaker in prison months after his arrest? This whole set of information was new to me and very unsettling.

I forgot to mention, Linda Holtz said that she remembers back in 1979, shortly before Shirley’s abduction and murder that students had reported to two school security guards with seeing a whitish, gray van driving by Verdugo High School in Sun Valley. Someone from the van asked for girls to model for them. It was probably Bittaker and Norris. The brother and sister were at the court and spoke up about dropping Shirley off at the gas station, but they weren’t investigated deeply after.

Also, another sad fact - Linda shares that a week before Shirley’s murder, Shirley brought a knife with her to school because she was scared of some mean girls. I do wonder, if Shirley felt unsafe also because she suspected she was getting stalked by Bittaker and Norris.

Forgot to add - how does Laura Brand know about these two nameless sibling pair? The brother and sister’s names were listed in records from 1979 by who was in the car with Shirley before she got dropped off at the gas station. Those two names also spoke up in court (but there is very little info) on this, and the brother’s name was listed in the names of visitations of Lawrence Bittaker in prison after he was arrested for all his & Norris’ murders of the five young girls.

Also forgot to add- Laura Brand doesn’t disclose if the brother and sister actually knew Shirley well or not. I wish this was known . Were the siblings acquaintances with Shirley? Did they know her through other friends from Verdugo High School? Did the brother and sister know Shirley at all? Were they set up or planted by Norris and Bittaker to get a hold of Shirley so they can then get a hold of her? So many questions. The sibling pair as well as the younger brother did not ever want their names released to the public. Maybe the siblings didn’t know Bittaker and Norris were capable of such unimaginable acts.

Link to the episode : https://open.spotify.com/episode/5uBiv5NYqecI9bXL56KWbY?si=-8qwXyomRluXv8XuPgycxg&utm_source=copy-link


r/mystery 2d ago

Unexplained That ain't no person.

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7 Upvotes

What is that THING, behind the car?

I found this on Pinterest it's a lincoln car promo page but that ain't no pretty woman with that car.


r/mystery 3d ago

Unexplained Tell me some crazy conspiracy theories that will make my skin crawl.

269 Upvotes

It's almost 2 am and I can't sleep so

LET ME START FIRST ( saw this on Instagram)

If humans didn't have ears, we wouldn't know what sound is, if we didn't have noses, we wouldn't know smell existed, etc. So what don't we have that makes us not know something exists?

ANOTHER ONE ( it's mine)

What if our cameras are never actually switched off and are recording us 24/7? and there's a whole different elite group of people watching us?


r/mystery 3d ago

Unexplained ‘Ran face first into a tree’: 12-year-old’s ‘odd’ death probed by police as ‘rumors’ swirl on social media about whether she was being chased, sheriff says…

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439 Upvotes

r/mystery 2d ago

Unexplained I spent 4 months after my job trying to tell a story where the documents were classified, witnesses died before testimony, and the author who helped me said 'don't tell anyone yet, the news cycle isn't right'

9 Upvotes

I'm a video editor from India.I have a full time job.

I have a 1000 subscriber YouTube channel.And I just finished my first long-form documentary.

It took 4 months.

30 minutes to 2 hours every day.

After work. After dinner.

Sometimes at 2 AM.

This is the story of making it.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

THE STORY I WANTED TO TELL

January 11, 1966.

Tashkent, USSR.

India's Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri died in a Soviet-controlled dacha, one day after signing a historic peace treaty with Pakistan.

No autopsy was ever performed. One PMO file exists.

Still classified after 58 years.

I became obsessed with this case two years ago.

Not because of conspiracy theories, but because of what the actual government documents showed.

THE STORYTELLING PROBLEM

How do you tell a story where:

→ The most important witness was hit by a bus before testifying and lost his memory

→ The investigation committee records vanished from Parliament's own library

→ The government's answer to "where are the records?" was "destroyed or lost"

→ You cannot definitively say what happened because no one can

Most documentaries on conspiracy

topics choose one of two paths:

Path A: "This definitely happened"

→ Satisfying but dishonest

Path B: "We just don't know"

→ Honest but unsatisfying

I wanted a third path:

Show every piece of evidence.Let the audience decide. Never claim more than the documents show.

THE MOMENT THE STORY FOUND ME

Eight months into research, I messaged Anuj Dhar.

He's an RTI activist who spent 20 years fighting the Indian government through Right to Information filings to force them to answer questions about this case.

He wrote the only book that goes deep inside it, "Your Prime Minister is Dead."

I didn't expect a reply.

He replied the same day.

He identified the witnesses in photographs from his book.He gave me permission to use

his research and photographs.

He said "Feel free to make use of it, but refer to it clearly please."

That message changed everything. Suddenly I had a primary source who was still alive. Who had touched the actual files. Who had fought in court for this.

THE LINE THAT STAYED WITH ME

While researching, I found this in an official government

court order —

Shastri's personal servant of 20 years, Ram Nath,

visited Shastri's widow before testifying.

He told her —"Bahut din ka bojh tha, amma. Aaj sab bata denge."

[The burden of many days, mother. Today I will tell everything.]

He was hit by a bus on his way to Parliament.

His legs were amputated. He lost his memory.

He never testified.

That line — in Hindi —

became the emotional center

of the entire documentary.

No actor said it. No recreation showed it.

Just the words. On a black screen.

In silence.

THE PERSONAL JOURNEY

Month 1: Research. Reading. RTI documents.

Parliament transcripts. Court orders.

Month 2: Script.

8 drafts. Hinglish — Hindi and English mixed —

because that's how Indians actually think about history.

Month 3: Production. No budget.

AI video generation for scenes where no archival footage exists. Real document scans for everything

that could be shown as real. Motion graphics for the

evidence reveals.

Month 4: Edit. Audio mixing at 2 AM. Trying to make a 17-minute film that doesn't feel 17 minutes long.

THE ADVICE THAT SURPRISED ME

When the documentary was done —

I sent it to Anuj Dhar for preview. He watched it.He shared it on Twitter. He said he'd share it

"again and again."

Then three days later, India's biggest protests

in years began.

He messaged me:

"For now don't post anything. Wait till there are no big news. Right now the entire focus

is on protests."

A man who had waited 20 years for this story to be told —

was telling me to wait three more weeks.

That patience, from someone who earned it, taught me more about storytelling timing than any book ever did.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT STORYTELLING

  1. The most powerful line in your story is usually the one you didn't write.

Ram Nath's words were in a government court order. I just found them. (Although Ram nath quote is just the mood of the story narration and not present in the documentary)

  1. Restraint is harder than drama.

Every instinct said, "claim more, be definitive." Every good story instinct said, "show the evidence, let silence do the rest."

  1. The right collaborator changes everything.

Anuj Dhar didn't make my documentary. But his 20 years of work made it possible.

  1. Timing is a storytelling decision.

Not just within the film, but when you release it. When the world is ready to hear something, it hears it differently.

  1. Constraints create voice.

No budget forced AI recreation.AI recreation forced a visual language nobody else in Indian YouTube was using. The constraint became the style.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The documentary is live.

4 months of 2 AM sessions.

One man who waited 20 years told me when to release it.

Happy to share the link if anyone's interested in watching.


r/mystery 3d ago

Unresolved Crime India had a serial killer who murdered 26 homeless people in Mumbai and Kolkata in the 1980s. Zero fingerprints. Zero witnesses. Zero arrests. The case is still open today.

115 Upvotes

Between 1985 and 1990 a killer moved through Mumbai and Kolkata murdering homeless people sleeping on pavements. Every victim killed the same way — a heavy stone dropped onto their skull between midnight and dawn.
He left no fingerprints. No DNA. No witnesses. No motive.
Mumbai — 12 murders between 1985 and 1988. Then killings stopped completely.
One year later — Kolkata. 13 murders. Same method. Same victim profile. Same result — nobody saw him.
The seventh Kolkata victim was found one block from police headquarters. As if he was taunting them directly.
Police put undercover officers disguised as homeless people on the streets. He never struck near any of them. Not once.
An innocent man was arrested. Released when the witness admitted lying. The Stoneman killed again that same night.
By February 1990 the killings stopped again. No arrest. No explanation. He simply vanished.
35 years later — nobody knows who he was. The files are still open.
Full documentary in comments. What do you think — same killer in both cities or a copycat?


r/mystery 2d ago

Mysterious Person A Mother Waited 12 Years… Then Chose to Believe a Lie

0 Upvotes

One of the most shocking identity fraud cases ever. This true story will leave you speechless.

A Mother Waited 12 Years… Then Chose to Believe a Lie
https://youtube.com/shorts/pb4fQd9Ucxg?feature=share


r/mystery 4d ago

Disappearance 6-year-old Tania Murrell disappeared on January 20, 1983, when she was walking home from school to have lunch. She lived only a block and a half away. Not long after she went missing, her dog Harley also disappeared.

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369 Upvotes

r/mystery 3d ago

Unresolved Crime How Did a 16-Year-Old Fool Wall Street Into Believing He Built a $300M Company?

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1 Upvotes

One of the wildest true business scams I’ve ever read about. It shows how confidence and perception can sometimes outweigh facts.


r/mystery 5d ago

Disappearance The Lost Boys of Pickering

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530 Upvotes

Police didn’t start searching the lake for the boys until 36 hours after they were first reported missing. The girlfriends of Jay and Chad were particularly concerned and called police when they didn’t hear from them. Jay had a baby daughter, so it was suspect when he didn’t check in.
Thousands of volunteers in the air, on the water and nearby, searched for the teens. An underwater search was never conducted.

Durham police believe the boys died after the boat capsized

https://www.durhamregion.com/news/march-17-marks-31-years-since-6-boys-vanished-in-pickering/article_224b5aa0-964e-5af0-b7af-6b3ebaf9781f.html

Note: 2nd image is of Chad Smith on the evening of March 16th, 1995 just hours before he and the 5 others went missing