People have always had a thing for unsolved mysteries.
We can't stop thinking about the possibilities and it doesn't help when the creep factor
is through the roof.
High-profile unsolved cases are even worse for the coverage they get.
Here are unsolved celebrity passings that'll keep you up at night.
Jason Mizell, better known as Jam Master Jay, the DJ who anchored the iconic Queens trio
Run-D.M.C., was as well-liked as anyone in the hip-hop industry, so his shocking passing
was especially baffling.
In October 2002, Jay was working in the studio when an unknown group of people arrived.
An hour later, he suffered a wound to the back of the head, and to this day,
the only people who know why aren't talking.
Fifteen years after the crime, former NYPD detective Derrick Parker revealed that the
case was once actually close to being "somewhat solved."
"So you think you know who killed Jam Master Jay?"
"Yes."
Parker chalks the case's persistent unsolved status up to the failure of witnesses to cooperate,
which there just may be a good reason for.
According to Jay's cousin Ryan Thompson, any potential witnesses would be jailed as accomplices
if they spoke up.
But by late October 2017, the case was officially deemed cold, and it doesn't seem like it'll
be heating up anytime soon.
The passing of Natalie Wood riveted the nation in 1981.
During the filming of the thriller Brainstorm, the actress was enjoying some R&R aboard a
yacht anchored off Catalina with husband Robert Wagner and castmate Christopher Walken.
Somehow, Wood vanished from the boat, and her body was later found floating over a mile
away.
The death was ruled an accidental drowning, until the case was reopened in 2011 due to
new information from witnesses.
Investigators have largely kept the nature of this information under wraps, but enough
is known to poke some serious holes in Wagner's story.
He claims he and Walken had an argument, then calmed down and noticed that Wood was missing.
But multiple witnesses claimed to have heard a man and a woman arguing heatedly during
the time frame in question, and investigators have also noted that Wagner has at times failed
to get his story straight.
Furthermore, Wood was known to be terrified of water, and according to Los Angeles County
Detective Ralph Hernandez, she looked like she had been assaulted when investigators
recovered her body.
Wagner, now in his 80s, was deemed a person of interest in 2018.
The renewed investigation has been ongoing ever since.
Bruce Lee wasn't just a master of martial arts, he was martial arts.
He beat up Chuck Norris onscreen, and he once kicked karate master Bob Wall so hard that
he flew backward into an extra and broke the extra's arm.
It seemed like nothing could ever take him down, but something did, even if we still
don't know what it was over four decades later.
Lee passed at the age of 32 in a friend's apartment.
The official cause of passing was cerebral edema, a swelling of the brain, but theories of the
underlying cause immediately began to fly.
These included heat stroke caused by having the sweat glands in his armpit removed, an
allergic reaction to a painkiller, and even a ninja assassination.
But no satisfactory explanation was ever found, unless Lee indeed found it himself.
As depicted in the 1993 bio-pic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Lee was convinced that a
demon stalked the male members of his family, including his son Brandon, who would pass in
a tragic accident in 1993 during filming of The Crow.
Jack Nance was the unlikely muse of David Lynch, who cast him as the lead in his surreal
masterpiece Eraserhead.
Nance also appeared in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, and he would've gone on to anchor even
more Lynchian weirdness had he not gotten involved in a random street fight in 1997.
After exchanging words with two young men in a doughnut shop, Nance was punched twice
in the head.
He arrived home complaining of a terrible headache, but otherwise he didn't seem out
of sorts.
The next day, a friend who stopped by to check up on him found him succumbing of his injuries.
Lynch remembered his friend as easily irritated and prone to being vocal about it, which may
have had something to do with the altercation.
The men who delivered the fatal punches were never identified, and decades after the fact,
it's highly doubtful they ever will be.
Bob Crane was the genial, handsome star of '60s sitcom Hogan's Heroes.
His squeaky-clean image made his gruesome 1978 death all the more unfathomable.
He was discovered in his Scottsdale, Arizona, home with his head bashed in and an electrical
cord tied around his neck.
But if his passing was shocking, the details about his private life that leaked out afterward
were even more mind-boggling.
Crane was heavily into photographing and otherwise documenting his romantic encounters with women,
something his friend John Henry Carpenter might have helped him with.
Carpenter immediately became the focal point of the investigation and was even tried for
the crime in 1994, but he was ultimately acquitted.
A 2016 re-examination of DNA evidence also failed to pin the crime on Carpenter, who
died in 1998, and the case officially went cold once again.
The case was the subject of the 2002 film Auto Focus, starring Greg Kinnear and Willem
Dafoe as Crane and Carpenter.
While the film certainly isn't reserved in its opinion that Carpenter was responsible
for the crime, it's doubtful we'll ever know for sure.
"If the blood found in John Carpenter’s car is from Bob Crane, Carpenter is almost
certainly the villain.
There is no other plausible explanation."
Musician Peter Ivers composed some of the music for Eraserhead, and then he spent the
early '80s making a name for himself on the burgeoning New Wave scene.
He championed the genre as the host of USA Network's New Wave Theatre from 1981 to 1983.
His eccentric style could border on performance art in its own right, and he may have well
been on his way to national stardom had his life not been cut brutally short on March
1, 1983.
Ivers was found bludgeoned to death in his L.A. apartment, and police determined he had
been offed by an intruder, perhaps an "opportunistic burglar."
However, one potential suspect was David Jove, the creator of New Wave Theater whom Ivers
didn't always get along with.
But Jove was never charged, and it soon became apparent that no additional leads would be
forthcoming.
On November 16, 2010, Hollywood power agent Ronni Chasen was driving along Sunset Boulevard
through a ritzy neighborhood after leaving the premiere party for Burlesque.
As she slowed her vehicle, someone pumped four shots from a handgun through her drivers'
side window, killing her almost instantly.
It was a shocking killing, and if critics are to be believed, the Beverly Hills Police
Department bungled the investigation so thoroughly that it's unlikely to ever be solved.
The BHPD's search quickly focused on Harold Smith, a down-and-out nobody who killed himself
when police confronted him.
The case was declared closed, but documents released in 2017 show an extremely limited
investigation that ignored other persons of interest and failed to take advantage of all
available surveillance footage.
Even in light of this information and the fact that not one shred of physical evidence
links Smith to the crime, the case has not been reopened.
Christa Helm was never a household name, but she might've been eventually if she hadn't
met her mysterious fate.
Arriving in Hollywood in the early '70s, Helm managed to land bit parts on such popular
TV series as Starsky and Hutch and Wonder Woman, but she was allegedly much more prolific
with her romantic dalliances.
She was rumored to have bedded such diverse talents as Warren Beatt, Joe Namath, and Mick
Jagger, and she wasn't shy about recording all the juicy details in a diary.
One day, a friend received a postcard from Helm with an ominous message:
"I am in way over my head here.
I'm into something I can't get out of."
Shortly thereafter, Helm was brutally stabbed and bludgeoned to death on a West Hollywood
street.
When investigators attempted to find her diary, it was conspicuously missing.
It was theorized that she had turned to extortion to supplement her sparse acting gigs, but
nothing was ever proven.
In 1966, rocker Bobby Fuller was riding high with his band, the Bobby Fuller Four, basking
in the success of their hit single "I Fought the Law."
He had just signed a fat distribution deal when he received a fateful phone call early
in the morning on July 18.
After the call, he departed his apartment in his mother's Oldsmobile, but we'll never
know who he was going to meet or why.
Later in the day he was found dead of asphyxiation in the car's front seat.
Bruises covered his body, and he'd been doused in gasoline.
Amazingly, responding officers quickly determined that Fuller had killed himself.
A nearby gas can was disposed of without being dusted for prints, people were never questioned,
and the bruises were chalked up to the gas fumes and the summer heat.
Fuller's family, however, never believed that he had killed himself.
He was at the peak of fame and showed no signs of depression.
The 2015 book I Fought the Law: The Life and Strange Passing of Bobby Fuller offers the theory
that Roulette Records owner Morris Levy was involved with Fuller's passing after Fuller
attempted to back out of a business deal with Levy.
However, the case remains unsolved.