There are no shortage of creepy unexplained mysteries that need to be solved.
With modern technology we can only hope an overlooked clue brings cases to a close but
for the most part it seems these cases cannot be explained.
Number 5
The Lady of the Dunes is one of the most disturbing and creepy mysteries from Massachusetts history
which has captured the imaginations of true crime enthusiasts around the world.
The crime is now more than 40 years old, but neither the victim or the culprit has ever
been identified.
The story started in 1974, with a young family on a walk along the Race Point Dunes in Provincetown.
When one of the dogs they were walking ran off ahead, the daughter followed and made
the grizzly discovery.
A woman’s body was found in an isolated area of the Dunes.
She was lying face down on a towel, her head resting on some folded jeans and a blue bandana.
There was no mistaking this woman as someone just relaxing in the sand, however.
She had a gruesome wound to her head which was believed to have caused her to pass away.
There were also other cuts to her throat and her hands had been severed, presumably to
stop the body from being identified.
It was estimated she had been there anywhere from 10 days to three weeks.
Police would spend weeks combing through the dunes, looking for any scrap of evidence that
could help identify the woman or find out who had done this to her, but there was nothing.
Even going through the records of everyone who had legally taken a buggy out onto the
dunes turned up no leads.
Due to the nature of the remains, only sketches and reconstructions of what the woman may
have looked like in life were ever released.
Even then, any description of the woman was fairly general.
She was white, with reddish-blonde hair.
She was between 20 and 40 years-old, 5ft6.5in tall and about 145 pounds.
She was also wearing pink nail polish on her toes.
The most notable aspect of the woman’s appearance was her dental work.
She had some missing teeth, though it’s not clear if these were recent removals or
something that was completely unrelated to her tragic fate.
She had what investigators described as “pricey New-York style” dental work and several
golden crowns.
But this didn’t help identify the victim.
The Lady of the Dunes, as she came to be known, was eventually buried with a headstone marking
her as unidentified.
Over the years she would be exhumed twice in the hopes of extracting more information.
On one occasion, her DNA was testingtested against the mother of Rory Gene Kesinger,
a missing woman who had broken out of prison not long before the body was found, but it
wasn’t a match.
The case gained more attention when author Joe Hill claimed he had spotted her in the
background of a scene in the film Jaws, which was filmed nearby shortly before the crime
took place.
A woman wearing a similar bandana and jeans was spotted as a background extra.
However, others pointed out this wasn’t exactly an uncommon outfit for women to wear
at the time, and even if it was the Lady of the Dunes, the film makers kept no records
of their extras.
Given investigators believe she knew the person who took her life, it’s unlikely we’ll
identify the criminal before we identify the Lady of the Dunes.
That doesn’t mean there haven’t been any suggestions, include James Whitey Bulger,
a mobster who was known to have removed the teeth from a female victim in the past, and
whose gang had committed similar crimes.
However, he was never identified as a suspect.
Another convicted criminal, Hadden Clark, later confessed to being responsible for the
heinous act, but his confession was suspect due to his mental condition and there was
never any evidence connecting him to the crime.
In 1987, a Canadian woman told authorities her father had taken the life of the woman
while on a trip to Massachusetts, but she had vanished before local authorities could
question her further.
Detectives now hope developments with genetic genealogy will someday at least give the Lady
of the Dunes back her name, even if they can’t figure out who did this to her.
Number 4
In 2001, an 86-year-old man walked away from a resort in Costa Rica and has not been seen
since.
Leo Widicker was a self confessed workaholic who had only retired from working on a farm
a few years before he disappeared.
He didn’t like to be idle and since his retirement he and his wife of 55 years had
spent their time volunteering with a church group.
The group would go to different countries to build and paint churches and schools in
the local community.
Volunteers would have to pay their own way, but it was a way for the Widickers to see
the world and for Leo to still be busy in his retirement.
The couple had been on 41 of these projects, including Leo’s final trip to Costa Rica
in November 2001.
Leo would spend most of these trips bricklaying but on the trip to Costa Rica the volunteer
group were instead painting newly built churches and schools.
On November 18th, five days into the trip, the groupedgroup stopped off at a hot springs
resort.
They had just finished their work in a suburb of San Jose and were getting ready to travel
to a northernthe northern part of the country when they took a break.
Leo’s wife, Virginia, decided to take a dip in the hot springs while Leo waited on
a bench at the side of the road about 20 feet away.
Virginia spent about 25 minutes in the hot springs before going back to where Leo had
been sitting.
He was nowhere to be seen.
Virginia went back to the resort, where employees claimed to have seen Leo about 15 minutes
earlier.
He was asking about Virginia, apparently having either forgotten where she was or thinking
she had gone back to the resort.
He then asked guards at the gate if he could leave.
They didn’t have a problem with this, and figured he was going to one of the other hot
springs in the area.
When they realised Leo was missing, members of the volunteer group went out in a car along
the road Leo had walked down.
Given his age and the difficult weather conditions, they figured he could only have walked for
a couple of miles, but there was no sign of him.
The road was bordered on one side by a fence but on the other was a drop into the jungle.
Leo’s family feared he might have fallen asleep on the bench and woken up confused
before wandering into the jungle.
There’s no mention he had any kind of dementia but it’s possible something like this had
happened before.
Locals familiar with the area searched for Leo in the jungle, but there was no sign of
him.
Members of his family and friends remain in Costa Rica, still trying to find out what
happened to him.
Number 3 It was the summer of 1993 when Justin Burgwinkel
went AWOL.
Justin had joined the army three years earlier.
He had once aimed to be part of the elite Rangers regiment, and he had taken to learning
Korean in preparation.
That process was halted after he was caught shoplifting, though, and it seems he sent
the rest of his service working as a line cook.
But there may have been more to Justin’s service than met the eye.
While stationed at Fort Ord in California in 1992 he met Iolanda Antunes, a student
who would become his long-term girlfriend.
Not long after they started dating, though, he began acting strangely.
He would come visit her when he had weekend leave but, sometimes mid-conversation, he
would suddenly look at his watch and say he had to get back to base.
He told her it would be better for her to not know what he was involved in, which only
made her suspicious he was living a double life.
In early 1993 he was moved to Fort Lewis in Washington.
The separation from Iolanda apparently broke his heart but he promised to come back and
see her when he could.
It was months before he would get leave, but he did as promised and drove down to see her.
Iolanda noticed he was acting even stranger by now.
He brought with him a briefcase he was very secretive over.
At one point Iolanda saw him shredding papers from inside the case.
Another time she walked in on him sat on her living room floor, crying.
When she asked him to tell her what was going on, he said it was nothing and they should
go out for dinner.
They had a strange conversation around this time.
Justin showed Iolanda his dog tags and asked if she knew what they were.
He told her they were used to identify a soldier’s body if they passed away in the field, and
if she every saw them lying about without him she should assume he was no longer alive.
It was a conversation she wouldn’t think much of until months later.
One evening, when Justin was out with friends, Iolanda received a strange phone call.
The person on the other end of the line just said “the mission’s off”.
When Iolanda asked who this was and what they meant, they simply asked her to pass on the
message to Justin.
Justin freaked out when he got the message.
A few days later, he would start the drive back to Fort Lewis.
On the way, he bought two weapons and ammunition for them, then turned and drove back to Iolanda.
On June 7th, he was reported AWOL, three days after he failed to return back to work in
Washington.
Justin’s parents eventually convinced him to phone the base, and he told them he was
taking care of some things and he would return as soon as possible.
He told Iolanda and his parents that he wasn’t AWOL, he was on a mission.
He wouldn’t tell Iolanda what that mission was, but instructed her to watch the movie
White Sands, a film about smuggling, the CIA and the FBI, if she wanted any more information.
At 10am on June 12th, Justin left Iolanda’s apartment.
It was the last time he would be seen.
Three months later, his car was found at a beach front motel near Monterey, where he
had originally been stationed.
The motel said he had never booked a room with them and couldn’t give any information
about when the car had arrived.
Inside the car was the now empty briefcase, Justin’s ID, credit cards, and dog tags.
He had taken the recently purchased weapons and ammunition and apparently disappeared
into thin air.
No answers surrounding Justin’s story have ever been found.
It’s possible he was suffering from some kind of mental breakdown and wasn’t really
on any kind of secret mission.
Although, if that’s the case, who the person on the phone was has never been explained.
Alternatively, he could really have been working for the CIA, and disappeared as part of the
job.
Number 2
In June 1980, Trevor Parker walked into his father’s coal yard in Todmorden, England,
and made a strange discovery.
Lying on top of a 10 foot pile of coal was a man wearing a three-piece suit.
The shirt was missing, the suit and shoes had been fastened strangely, and the man was
no longer alive.
A look of horror was etched on his face.
This was Zigmund Adamski, an ordinary man who had gone missing five days ago.
What happened to him in thatat that time is a baffling mystery that remains unsolved.
Zigmund was a 56-year-old miner at the Lofthouse Colliery.
He lived with his wife in a town about 20 miles away from where his body was found.
On June 6th, at about 3:30pm, he left his home, telling his wife he was going to a nearby
store to buy groceries.
He stopped on the way to chat with a neighbour.
The whole community was very close knit.
It was the last time he would be seen alive.
After discovering the body, Trevor Parker contacted police and Constable Alan Godfrey
arrived at the scene.
He noted how haunting the look on Zigmund’s face was.
It looked like he had been scared to death.
Despite being missing five days, he only had one day’s beard growth.
His hair had also been messily cut.
There was no coal on top of the body, which was lying on its back, and nothing had been
displaced.
Trevor said the body had not been there when he had been in the yard a few hours earlier,
and Godfrey was certain someone or something had put him there.
The exact cause of his passing was unclear.
He had some burns on his neck and body which seemed similar to acid burns.
A strange ointment which was never identified had been placed on the burns on the back of
his neck.
The coroner eventually determined he had passed away due to a heart attack, though noted it
was the strangest case of his career.
Who or what could have done this to Zigmund remains a mystery.
Rumours of extraterrestrial abduction rose.
This wasn’t helped when, less than six months later, Constable Godfrey had a missing time
incident while investigating a case of some missing cattle.
Other police officers noted lights in the sky and he later filed a UFO report.
Under hypnosis, he recounted being taken aboard an alien ship and examined by non-human beings,
though he would later say that was probably just a dream.
He was forced to retire not long after the incident.
Many are not convinced Zigmund was abducted by aliens, but there aren’t many plausible
explanations either.
Some have suggested an argument with a family member who was living with him at the time,
but the other details of the case don’t add up.
The KGB has also been blamed, though what they would want with a Yorkshire miner is
never specified.
On Easter Sunday, 1967, Jim Thompson went on a walk while on holiday in the Cameron
Highlands and never returned.
Jim was an American who had been living in Thailand since World War 2.
He had originally trained as an architect but, when that didn’t work out, joined the
army.
He worked as an officer at the Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS, a precursor to the CIA.
After winning numerous medals for his work in the European theatre, he was relocated
to Thailand.
But after the war Jim began to disagree with American foreign policy, and with the return
of European colonial powers to the region.
He did not join the CIA when it was set up and instead became a successful businessman.
He became known as the Thai silk king as he reinvigorated the country’s silk industry.
After an investment of just a few hundred dollars, he would eventually make hundreds
of thousands of dollars.
He invested heavily in art and designed a building that combined local architectural
styles with his own twist.
At one point he was going to donate it all to the Siam Society (sigh am) after he passed
away, but an argument about whether some of the artefacts were in fact stolen caused him
to change his will shortly before the ill-fated trip to Malaysia in 1967.
The morning of March 26th, 1967, was completely ordinary.
He was staying with friends, Dr and Mrs Ling, at the Moonlight Cottage in the highlands.
They went to church in the morning then went back to the cottage to rest.
But Jim was an adventurous man.
Just the day before he and Dr Ling had set off for a 30 minute walk to a golf course,
only to get turned around and lost.
It took them four hours to reach the golf course.
Jim loved the experience.
At 3:30pm, he left the house for a walk.
His hosts didn’t see him go but did hear his footsteps on the gravel.
It wasn’t uncommon for him to go for a walk at aroundwalk around that time so they didn’t
worry about it.
When he didn’t return, however, they contacted police.
Jim Thompson was never found.
Given his experience in World War 2, there were countless conspiracy theories.
Some suggested the US took him out due to his opposition to the war in Vietnam.
Others have suggested he had been having an affair with a married woman whose husband
took Jim’s life.
Police contacted criminal organizations in the area who denied any involvement in the
disappearance.
The most likely answer is heist that he simply got lost in the jungle and perished due to
exposure, but a recent documentary suggest the Malaysian Communist Party was actually
responsible.
Jim had been asking to meet the chairman of the party, who was the most wanted man in
Malaysia at the time, and the party was suspicious of his motivation.
A deathbed confession in the 2010s allegedly claimed a local branch of the party took him
out.
However, the Party had never been shy about claiming high profile hits, and it would have
been out of character for the group to stay quiet about any involvement in Jim Thompson’s
disappearance.