The FBI have covered some strange and mysterious cases over the years.
Everything from missing persons to espionage can fall into the organisations remit, and
sometimes even simple looking cases can have strange aspects
Number 5
The FBI can sometimes get involved in missing person cases, especially if it seems like
a crime has been committed or if the missing person is a child.
In the case of Daniel Kwon, it definitely seems like foul play was involved when he
vanished in September 2019.
Daniel was 77-years-old at the time of his disappearance and paralysed from the chest
down after an accident decades earlier.
He relied on a wheelchair and a specially modified vehicle to get around.
He was a relatively private man, but attended church independently and, apparently, visited
friends without the assistance of his two daughters.
Daniel was last seen on September 3rd, 2019, when he left his home in Atlanta, Georgia,
and didn’t come back.
Daniel’s daughters grew concerned when they couldn’t get in touch with him and found
personal items missing from his home.
One of those items was his cell phone, which the women were able to track.
They tracked their father’s phone to an apartment complex in the neighbouring county,
but the phone switched off before they could pin point its exact location, apparently running
out of battery.
This didn’t cause too many problems, though, as the women found Daniel’s car parked outside
one of the buildings.
At this point, they reported Daniel missing to the police.
Police immediately began canvassing the area, looking for any information.
One of the neighbours happened to be a radio dispatcher for the county police department.
She told authorities she recognised the vehicle, as it had visited the complex several times,
and was able to point out the apartment Daniel had visited on those occasions.
Rather than police investigating the location, the Daniel’s family found out the information
and a friend decided to pay the apartment a visit.
There they found a woman named Mi Young Cho Jeon and her husband, who was a preacher at
the church Daniel attended.
The woman had a number of Daniel’s personal belongings, and was trying to leave through
the backdoor with Daniel’s wheelchair when the friend arrived.
Jeon was questioned by police.
She told them she knew Daniel through church, and he often visited to enjoy her home cooked
meals.
On September 3rd, he had come to visit Jeon, as usual.
He told her he was waiting for three people to come and pick him up, and Jeon fed him
while he waited.
He also told her he had some financial concerns related to his daughters.
Jeon told police the men Daniel had been waiting for had come and he had left with them, leaving
his belongings at her home.
Daniel’s daughters say they had never met Jeon, and do not believe he would willingly
disappear from their lives.
One of Daniel’s daughters, Grace, helped her father with his finances, and was able
to notice a large sum of money had been withdrawn from his account after he disappeared.
She believes his disappearance was in some way related to the money.
Police have named Jeon as a person of interest but currently have no suspects and no clues
that could lead them to the missing man.
Number 4
We often think of the FBI as investigating the most serious of crimes, as well as the
biggest unknowns that threaten the United States, but not every case is like that.
One of the cases the FBI is seeking information on, among the numerous missing persons or
armed robberies, is the theft of a simple violin.
The violin in question is worth $900,000 and was created by one of the most influential
violin craftsmen in the instrument’s history.
And, remarkably, it may have been stolen by accident.
Hieronymus Amati II, the grreat grandson of the person credited for inventing the modern
violin, crafter this particular violin in 1710, in the middle of a golden age for the
craft, from maple and alpine sprice trees.
Over the years it was kept in great condition, and only grew in value until it wound up in
the hands of Rowland Weinstein in October 2013.
Weinstein was an art collector, but took a shining to the instrument and bought it at
auction.
He couldn’t play himself, but considered himself the instrument’s care taker, and
let friends and talented musicians play the violin.
Weinstein had been hit by theives before.
In 2011, a 1965 Pablo Picaso drawing was stolen from his gallery.
After this, he was especially cautious and in December 2020 he grew concerned that the
place he had been keeping the violin wasn’t safe enough.
He took the violin to his home in Los Feliz, and left it in his white Tesla which he parked
outside.
Unbeknownst to him, this was the wrong decision.
The car locked automatically once the keys were taken a certain distance away from the
vehicle.
However, on Decmeber 8th, while Weinstein was driving home, the keys fell out of his
pocket and wound up on the floor of the car.
He went inside, thinking the vehicle was secure, only to realise his mistake when he came outside
a while later to find it missing with the violin inside.
The FBI have taken on the investigation.
It’s not believed the violin was the true target of the theft, meaning the thief probably
didn’t know it’s true worth and didn’t treat it with care.
So far nether the violin nor the car have been found.
Number 3
Throughout its history, the CIA has only ever found three moles within its organisation,
but the mystery surrounding the possibility of a fourth mole is something the FBI has
been investigating since the 1980s.
Oleg Gordievsky joined the Soviet Union’s KGB in the 1960s.
He quickly rose up through the ranks and became one of the hundreds of spies the organisation
had on the front lines of the Cold War.
But Oleg was not fiercely loyal to the USSR.
He had believed in the Union growing up, but the building of the Berlin wall was a turning
point for him.
When he was stationed abroad, he became even more disenchanted with the Soviets and particularly
the KGB, which he deemed to be full of bureaucrats.
In the late 1960s, he became a double agent, passing on information to the British intelligence
agencies in an effort to undermine his official employers.
He became a valuable asset to both the British and the US.
That came to an abrupt end in May 1985.
Oleg was stationed in London when he received a message saying he needed to go back to Moscow
urgently.
He was supposedly going to be promoted and some high-ranking officials wanted to see
him.
Oleg knew this was almost definitely a trap but his MI6 handlers said there was no sign
anything was wrong.
He returned to Moscow, where it was obvious someone had broken into his apartment to search
for evidence.
A few days later, he would be kidnapped and held while a KGB general tried to force a
confession.
He was eventually taken home.
The KGB didn’t have the evidence they needed, but it wouldn’t be long before they did.
Oleg was smuggled out of the country in a specially modified Land rover by three MI6
agents.
He was taken to the UK, where he still lives.
The situation was incredibly worrying for the CIA.
One spy being found out was bad, but this was not an isolated occurrence.
Dozens of people working undercover for the CIA and its allies had been exposed in just
a few months.
At least 10 were not as lucky as Oleg.
It was clear the CIA had a mole in its ranks.
A special investigatory team was set up and a man named Aldrich Ames was arrested in 1994.
He had been made chief of the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence branch some years earlier
and had access to all the information the Soviets would need to take out the CIA’s
spies.
There was only one problem.
Ames gave a detailed account of his work for the KGB, including the exact date he had handed
over a dossier on spies working in the USSR.
June 13th, 1985.
This was more than a month after Oleg received his summons back to Moscow.
The KGB had already concluded Oleg and two others were spies before Ames had handed over
their names.
The CIA and FBI have both set up investigations to try to work out who outed Oleg.
The only two other moles in the CIA didn’t have access to information on Oleg in 1985.
It is, of course, possible Ames was lying about the date, but the CIA and FBI had reasons
to believe this wasn’t the case.
The possibility of an undercover mole caused an air of paranoia in the CIA, but I was a
risk too great for the organisation to ignore.
It’s not known if the FBI still has the case open, but it remains unsolved.
Number 2
In November 2017, a boarder patrol officer in Texas lost his life while on duty.
His partner was severely injured, but survived.
What happened to them remains a mystery.
Rodelio Martinez and his partner Stephen Garland were investigating smugglers in Culberson
County, Texas.
It was a relatively isolated area, and smugglers were known to hide their contraband in drainage
tunnels that ran under the interstate highway.
The pair parked their patrol car above one such tunnel, possibly to inspect something.
The next thing anyone is certain of is that Agent Martinez was found a short while later,
lying on his back at the entrance on the other side of the highway.
Agent Garland was able to tell a radio dispatcher “we ran into a culvert” but nothing more.
Though he survived the incident, he has no memory of what happened.
Agent Martinez passed away due to blunt force trauma in to the head.
However, there was no sign of a struggle and all the injuries n his body were on one side.
The local sheriff was one of the first people to investigate the case.
He believes it was an accident.
The drop from the highway to the bottom of the tunnel was 10 feet, and a fall from that
height could explain the injuries.
It was a dark, moonless night when the incident occurred, and it’s possible they didn’t
know how big the drop was.
However, Agent Garland’s wording, that they went into a culvert, confuses matters slightly,
as they wouldn’t have gone into the tunnel at all if they had fallen from above.
Politicians and the Boarder Patrol union disagreed with the sheriff’s conclusion.
They suspected the two agents were attacked by smugglers who threw rocks at them.
The FBI launched an investigation shortly after the incident.
They conducted hundreds of interviews, searched for cell phone pings and surveyed the area
from the sky, but no explanation that satisfied the union for how two trained agents could
suffer these injuries has been found.
Number 1
On 4th of July, 2015, while most families were celebrating the holiday, Sherry Ballard
was trying to get in touch with her daughter.
Nobody had seen Crystal Rodgers since the night before.
Crystal lived with her boyfriend and the father of her youngest child, Brooks Houck.
According to Houck, she had been at home, playing games on her phone when he went to
bed at around midnight.
When he woke up, she was gone and her car was missing.
Crystal’s mother claims this was strange, as she would never just leave her five children.
But Houck wasn’t worried, as she often spent the night at a cousin’s house or with friends.
Crystal’s family contacted police to report her missing on July 5th.
The same day, her car was found with a flat tyre on the side of the highway.
Her keys, purse, and cell phone were still inside, but it didn’t seem like Crystal
had driven the car herself.
The driver’s seat was in the wrong position and Crystal’s mother believe someone else
drove the car to the side of the highway.
Unfortunately, almost six years on, this was the last major break in the case.
Houck immediately fell under suspicion.
He didn’t appear to be concerned to Crystal’s family and didn’t help search for the mother
of his son.
His brother was a police officer, who told Houck not to talk to investigators and was
eventually fired from the force.
Houck’s home and the home of some family members were the subjects of FBI raids, though
it’s not known if anything useful was discovered.
Strangely, Crystal’s disappearance may be connected to two other deaths.
The first is that of her own father, Tommy Ballard.
Tommy had led efforts to find his daughter, but 16 months after she vanished, he passed
away.
He was on a hunting trip with a 12-year-old grandson on property owned by his son when
he was struck in the chest by a bullet.
It’s not known if it was an accident; someone else who was hunting on the land could have
mistaken Tommy for an animal.
But his family believe it’s too much of a coincidence and the FBI is also investigating
his death.
The second is of a man named Jason Ellis.
Jason was a police officer who was ambushed on his way home from work in 201.
The people responsible for his death have never been caught, but Crystal’s mother
believes she heard something related to the case
she shouldn’t have.