With time, even the strangest mysteries can be solved.
New technology and the resources have helped uncover answers this past decade to mysteries
that once seemed impossible to solve.
Number 5 In January 2007, villagers in Cambodia’s
Ratanakiri (rat in uh keer eee) province noticed a strange woman stealing food.
She wore no clothes and was covered in mud, and disappeared back into the jungle from
where she came.
Descriptions of the woman reached Sal Lou, a village policeman, who believed the woman
could be his long lost daughter.
His daughter had vanished almost 20 years earlier and, though he and local law enforcement
had searched for days, no signs of her could ever be found.
Sal Lou staked out the place where the woman was last seen and eventually spotted her.
He attracted her attention with food and water and claimed when she saw who he was she stood
straight and asked for her mother.
This was his daughter, Rochom, he claimed.
Rochom was taken back to the village and she made headlines around the world as the Cambodian
Jungle woman.
It didn’t take long for people to doubt Sal Lou, though.
The woman didn’t speak, and people couldn’t imagine her asking for her mother.
She didn’t walk upright and couldn’t make eye contact with people.
She only communicated her basic needs through pointing.
It did not seem like the woman had been living in the jungle for 20 years, and it was a mystery
what had really happened to her.
The family treated her well and tried to get her the help she needed.
She slowly began to adjust to life in the village, though would often run away into
the jungle for days at a time and still would not or could not speak.
An incident where she fell into a latrine set her back and she was taken to hospital.
A Spanish mental health charity arranged meetings to try to help and Rochom would interact with
her young nephew, but her family feared they couldn’t give her the help she needed.
A decade later, there was another twist in the case, and the mystery surrounding what
had happened to her was solved.
The province where the woman was found lay on the boarder with Vietnam and it was on
the other side of this border that answers were found.
A man identified only as Pel had seen a photo of the Cambodian Jungle Woman on Facebook
and recognised her as his own missing daughter, Tak.
Tak had suffered from mental health problems and had disappeared after a breakdown in 2006.
She hadn’t been in the jungle for 20 years, but the much more realistic 12 months.
Pel identified Tak through a scar on her wrist, a spot on her face, and an ear condition she
suffered from.
In 2016 she was reunited with her birth family in Vietnam and the mystery was finally solved.
Sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20110526030511/http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2011052449303/National-news/jungle-girl-slowly-adapting.html https://timeline.com/two-families-in-two-different-countries-claimed-this-wild-girl-was-their-vanished-daughter-9f32b39b4b6a
https://www.dawn.com/news/1274749 https://news.sky.com/story/cambodia-jungle-woman-returns-home-after-true-identity-revealed-10534127
Number 4 Trains can be delayed for some strange things,
with leaves on the line causing cancellations being a common joke in some parts of the world,
but in 1920 operators in Japan were faced with something truly bizarre.
A mass of millipedes had descended onto the tracks in the mountains west of Tokyo.
The creepy crawlies were as white as ghosts, reports said, and seemed to appear from nowhere.
Operators had to stop the trains all together and wait until the millipedes had made their
journey over the line.
Then, as mysteriously as they had appeared, they vanished again into the leaves that covered
the forest floor.
It was a strange scene, and one which stuck with those that had seen it, but the milliards
seemed to have left without any interference from humans, and the trains continued unimpeded
for another eight years.
Then the mysterious creatures appeared again.
The millipedes in question are a species endemic to the mountains west of Tokyo.
They’re seen nowhere else in the world.
As a defence mechanism, they are able to realise the poison cyanide, but they didn’t seem
interested in attacking humans Every eight years, with the exception of 1944,
the train millipedes as they were called were reported in the exact same area.
Why this was remained a mystery for decades.
Researchers in Japan that studied cicadas were eventually able to find an answer.
Periodicity is used to describe where all the members of a species have synchronised
life cycles.
In the animal kingdom, it’s only found in a few species of cicadas, which have 13 and
17 year cycles.
Every 13 or 17 years, a new generation reaches maturity at the same time.
It is also seen in some bamboo species.
It was turn out, the millipedes were the only known non-insect example of periodicity in
the animal kingdom.
Every eight years, a new generation of the creepy crawlies would reach adulthood.
The disruption on the train tracks was just due to the new adults heading to new feeding
grounds.
An extensive study of the mountain found that there were seven broods.
The millipedes in each brood are synchronised so they’re born at the same time, reach
maturity at the same time, cross the tracks at the same time and after eight years expire
at the same time.
Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/science/millipede-swarms-japan-train.html https://www.livescience.com/train-stopping-millipedes-mystery-solved.html
Number 3
For decades, how The Butter Boat had come to rest on a beach in Ireland had been a mystery.
The boat could just about be seen at low tide, the wood sticking out of the sand at the beach.
This beach is famous for its shipwrecks.
The wrecks of three ships that had been part of the Spanish Armada lie nearby.
It’s site of some of the best preserved ships from this era.
The Butter Boat did not match these other ships in majesty or preservation.
It would be easy to overlook.
Locals told stories about what had happened to the boat.
Some claimed it had been part of the Armada, like the rest of the ships, while some records
claimed it had once been a tourist vessel that had become shipwrecked.
Eventually, 250 years after the Butter Boat have first wrecked, the truth was uncovered.
The Butter Boat’s real name had been The Greyhound.
It was an English merchant vessel that had come from Yorkshire.
The Greyhound had made many trips between Ireland and England in its years of service
but, in 1770 it was caught in a storm.
The sailors could not seek safe harbour in the nearby bay and were forced to anchor while
still out at sea, near some perilous cliffs.
They made the decision to abandon ship, and piled into row boats to escape.
In the panic, one of the cabin boys were forgotten, and it was only once they had made it to shore
that the mistake was realised.
Members of The Greyhound’s crew and volunteers from the local community and another ship
went back to try to rescue the stranded cabin boy.
They made it back to The Greyhound and had boarded before the storm swept the ship away.
It collided with some rocks and 20 of the 21 people aboard perished.
The story was only uncovered by an archaeological investigation, scientific analysis and research
by the National Monuments Service who were committed to telling the story and solving
the mystery of the Butter Boat.
Sources: https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/41fcd-shipwreck-mystery-solved-250-years-to-the-week-it-sank/ https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2020/1216/1184914-butter-boat-streedagh/
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/mystery-of-sligo-shipwreck-solved-250-years-after-it-sank-1.4438991
Number 2
In April 1977, Mavis and Charlie McLeod in Alberta, Canada, were visiting an abandoned
farm house they owned to see if they could find a pump for their septic tank back at
home.
Going to the farm house’s septic tank, they made a horrific discovery.
Dumped in the septic tank was the body of a man.
He had been there for months.
Limestone had been dumped in over him in the hopes it would speed up the decomposition
process.
This didn’t work, but the man had been so badly treated in the final moments of his
life that identification was impossible.
It took investigators months to even determine if they were looking at a man or a woman.
The man was eventually given the nickname Septic Tank Sam.
His life had been taken in what officers described as one of the most vicious, vindictive, and
sadistic crimes they had ever encountered.
Despite a the state of the remains, police were able to determine a few things about
him.
They discovered signs he had recently had dental work, and dental records were sent
to over 800 dental practitioners in the area.
They even featured in dental magazines.
But nobody was able to identity the Doe.
His clothing indicated he may have been a migrant to the area, working in construction
or as a farm hand, and medical examiners were even able to determine he had had a childhood
illness at the age of around five, but there were no matches.
The man was buried in a pauper’s grave, only to be exhumed a few years later so experts
could reconstruct his face to see if that gave them any new leads.
This time, they determined the man was likely Indigenous, rather than Caucasian as they
had originally assumed, and around 30 years of age.
New police sketches offered no new leads.
Police also hadn’t gotten much further in identifying the people who had committed the
crime.
They believed the criminals had known their victim, due to how personal the crime seemed,
but without an identity for the victim that didn’t help catch the criminals.
Finally, in 2020, investigators tried a new strategy.
Having seen genetic genealogy work so well in high profile US cases, the John Doe’s
DNA was sent to a company specialising in the science.
They were able to find relative matches and Septic Tank Sam was finally given a real name.
Gordon Edwin Sanderson.
Gordon had been an indigenous man born in Manitoba.
As part of the Sixties Scoop, he was taken from his parents and placed into foster care.
Unsurprisingly, this negatively affected him, and there are reports he grew up struggling
with addiction.
By the late 1970s, he was still in touch with his siblings and he had been on his way to
visit his brother when he disappeared.
His sister reported him missing, but there was no progress in the case until police informed
her Septic Tank Sam was in fact her brother.
The case is still not completely solved.
Who took Gordon’s life and why remains a mystery, but the identification gives some
closure to his family.
Number 1 For 40 years, the person who took the lives
of Bobbie Oberholtzer and Annette Schnee remained at large.
After a segment on the Unsolved Mysteries TV show, many believed Bobbie’s husband,
Jeff, to be responsible.
It was just too much of a coincidence that he knew both victims.
But in 2021 police finally charged someone with the crime, and it wasn’t Jeff.
January 6th, 1982, in Breckenridge, Colorado.
The weather was treacherous, particularly on the nearby Guanella Pass, where that evening
a pick up truck driver would be found in what was hailed as a miracle rescue.
The weather wasn’t too much of a concern for Bobbie, though, who informed her husband
she was going out with friends.
He offered to pick her up when she was finished, but she told him he was getting a ride home.
When she didn’t return home, Jeff went to search for her after the bars closed, only
to be told by her friends she had left at 7:30pm.
The next day, a farmer found her driver’s license and, when Jeff and some friends went
to pick it up, they found Bobbie’s backpack.
A search of the area revealed her body some 15 miles away.
Bloody tissues and an orange sock were found with the body.
The sock did not belong to Bobbie.
The same day, Annette Schnee’s family reporter her missing.
She was a waitress and often hitch-hiked to and from work.
She was last seen in the town centre at around 4pm, speaking with an unidentified woman.
Annette’s body was found six months later.
She was wearing an orange sock that matched the one found with Bobbie’s body, and had
Jeff’s business card in her wallet.
Even before Annette’s body was found, Jeff had told police he had picked her up once
when she was hitch-hiking and gave her his business card, so it wasn’t too surprising,
but the connection was too much.
They also couldn’t confirm Jeff’s alibi for the time his wife and Annette went missing.
Police determined a timeline of events.
Annette had been attacked, losing one of her socks in the attacker’s vehicle as she tried
to escape.
After the criminal had taken Annette’s life, they went back to the town where they picked
up Bobbie and drove her to the place her body was found.
As Bobbie tried to escape, the sock left in his vehicle fell out.
The weapon used to take the lives of both women also confirmed it was the same person.
It would take until the early 1990s for police to test the DNA on the tissues found near
Bobbie’s body.
It had been assumed it belonged to her, but this wasn’t the case.
The DNA also didn’t match Jeff, and he was finally cleared of the crime, but who was
responsible would remain a mystery for another three decades.
While Annette’s family were still looking for her, some papers in the area reported
on the miracle rescue of a truck driver who got stuck in the pass.
Alan Phillips had been travelling over the pass stuck in the snowstorm.
He used a flash light to signal SOS in Morse code, which was spotted by a policeman who
happened to be in a plane flying overhead.
The flight crew were alerted and they informed local rescue services on the ground about
the stranded man.
When Phillips was rescued, the firefighter found him with a large bruise on his face
which he said he got from walking into his truck door.
He said he had been out drinking and refused medical treatment and was taken home.
In 2021, genetic genealogy would show Phillips had been with both Bobbie and Annette the
night they passed away.
His DNA was matched to that found at the scenes of both crimes and he was charged with having
taken the lives of both women.
He is currently awaiting trial.