On a hot afternoon in 2003, a pizza deliveryman walked into a bank in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a bomb locked around his neck and a note demanding $250,000. What followed was one of the strangest, most disturbing crimes in American history — a lethal scavenger hunt, a frozen body, and a question that still has no clean answer: was Brian Wells a victim, or part of the plot that killed him?
In 1948 a well-dressed man was found dead on an Adelaide beach with no name, no labels in his clothes, and a scrap of paper reading “Tamam Shud” sewn into a hidden pocket. It took 74 years to give him back his name.
Between 1764 and 1767, something hunted the uplands of south-central France, killing as many as a hundred people – mostly women and children caught out alone. It resisted the peasants, the professional wolf-hunters, and finally the personal gun-bearer of King Louis XV. To this day, no one is certain what the Beast of Gévaudan really was.
In December 1872 a sailing ship was found adrift in the Atlantic, seaworthy and fully stocked, her cargo intact and a half-eaten meal below decks. Every one of the ten people aboard had vanished, and no trace of them was ever found.
On Christmas Eve 1945 a fire took the Sodder family home in West Virginia in less than an hour. Five of the children were never seen again, and not a single bone was ever found in the ashes. Their parents spent the rest of their lives certain the children had been carried off alive.
On a frozen slope in the Ural Mountains in 1959, nine experienced hikers cut their way out of their own tent and ran barefoot into a lethal night. Some were found with crushing injuries no one could explain. For sixty years the Dyatlov Pass incident defied every theory. Then science caught up.
