The brutal death of a child beauty queen, a town bombarded by blobs from the sky,
and the biggest rap mystery of an entire generation. These cases have grown cold,
but they're still raising questions.
Amber Hagerman was nine years old in 1996 when she rode her bike in the parking lot
of a grocery store just a stone's throw from her grandmother's home. She would have had no
idea that her life was about to come to a tragic end. A single witness came forward,
saying that they had seen someone driving a truck grab Hagerman off her bike.
"Arlington 911, what are you reporting?"
"Yeah, I saw a black pickup, he grabbed a little girl and he took off toward town with her."
The local Arlington, Texas police department was on high alert,
her kidnapping was covered by national media outlets, but in the end, it didn't matter. Her
body was recovered four days later: She had been killed and dumped in a creek.
In 2021, police issued another appeal for new information, and KIRO 7 news reported that there
still might be a good chance for justice. Police had DNA from the cold case and were going to be
making yet another attempt to take advantage of new technologies to try to find a match.
As tragic as Hagerman's disappearance and death was, a considerable amount of good has come
from it. After her murder, broadcasters and law enforcement worked together to create the AMBER
Alert System. In addition to being adopted across the U.S., the AMBER Alert System is also in use
in Europe, where 18 countries use it to notify the public of missing or kidnapped children.
In just 81 minutes on March 18, 1990, two people walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum,
restrained the two guards on duty, and stole around $500 million worth of art. One piece
alone — one of only about 34 surviving paintings by Johannes Vermeer — was worth
a whopping $250 million. Other stolen works included Rembrandt's Christ in the
Storm on the Sea of Galilee, a few other Rembrandts, some sketches by Edgar Degas,
and strangest of all? The museum's most valuable painting — by Titian — was left behind.
In spite of the fact that the museum continues to offer a $10 million reward to anyone who
comes forward with information that helps them recover the paintings,
not a single work has yet been recovered. Clues, however, are still lingering. In 2021,
NBC Boston reported that a then-local jeweler had come forward with testimony that one long-time
suspect, Bobby Donati, had approached him with one of the pieces stolen in the heist.
That report came on the heels of the death of another suspect, Robert Gentile. Gentile
had connections with the mob but always denied that he had anything to do with the
theft. The museum has never removed the empty frames where the 13 stolen pieces once hung,
and they remain as a reminder of one of the decade's biggest mysteries.
On December 6, 1991, emergency responders rushed to put out a fire in a yogurt shop in Austin,
Texas. Once the flames were out, they were shocked by what they saw:
the remains of four girls. The teenagers had been tied up, shot, and left in the building
as it was set on fire. Any evidence that may have been left behind was destroyed in the blaze, and
investigations led nowhere... until four men were arrested in 1999. But although the men confessed,
they later said they were innocent, and had only confessed under interrogation. The two who had
been convicted had those convictions overturned on appeal, and the case remains unsolved.
Law enforcement believed from the beginning that multiple people were
involved in the deaths of 13-year-old Amy Ayers, 15-year-old Sarah Harbison,
and 17-year-olds Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas. Leads came and fizzled,
and the case dragged on. Still, there's a chance that this may be solved someday.
In early 2022, CBS News reported that one of the victims had been sexually assaulted,
and the fire hadn't destroyed DNA evidence. Recovered along with the
rounds from the weapons used, the hope is that advances in DNA technology will
allow law enforcement to finally get a match and bring the killers to justice.
"Once my life is gone, it's gone. Can't nobody give it back to me. Not the judge,
not the president, not the governor. They can't do nothing but come to my funeral and talk pretty."
It was right after Mike Tyson put an end to a fight in 109 seconds on September 7,
1996 that Tupac Shakur was caught on camera for what would be the last time.
He was walking through the MGM Grand when he saw a gang member that had a previous
altercation with one of his Death Row Records associates, and the following fight was over
quickly. Shakur walked away, and was shot two hours later, as he sat at a stoplight.
Shakur died six days later of four gunshot wounds, and no one was ever arrested. There are a ton of
theories about just what went down that night, and as the journalist, filmmaker, and producer of the
series "Who Killed Tupac?" Stephanie Frederic explained to the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
And there were a ton of witnesses: Shakur was, at the time he was shot, sitting in a line of
cars filled with what was described as his Death Row entourage. While they all would have seen
the white Cadillac and the shooter, everyone has refused to talk. Law enforcement places the lack
of arrests squarely on the shoulders of the silent witnesses, and the killing remains unsolved.
June 16, 1991, was like any other day at the United Bank Tower in Denver,
Colorado. Until it wasn't. That was the day that an armed man went into the bank,
shot and killed four security guards, and left with around $200,000 in cash.
The following year saw a massive trial broadcast across the nation. James King was a retired
Denver police officer and had worked as a security guard at the bank before he was arrested for the
killings and the theft. There were a lot of strong feelings around the trial, with some pointing to
the fact that there was no actual evidence that it was him as a major red flag, while others were
convinced that he was definitely the guy. King was ultimately acquitted, but until his death in 2013,
he remained under constant surveillance by the FBI, and under just as constant suspicion.
In 2021, the Toronto Sun did a refresher on the case and noted that there was still
no official verdict. In spite of the evidence being circumstantial at best,
law enforcement still claimed that the right guy had gone free — but not everyone is convinced.
2021 saw the 25th anniversary of one of the highest-profile murder cases in the country:
the death of 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey.
Initially believed to be a kidnapping, police were called after Patsy Ramsey found a ransom
note asking for $118,000 for her daughter's safe return. Police went to the house,
and hours went by — a full eight hours. And that's when one detective told Ramsey's father,
John, to look around the house to see if he noticed anything odd. When he went into the
basement, he found his daughter. She had been strangled, beaten, and wrapped in a blanket.
What followed was what could accurately be described as a media feeding frenzy,
and the bottom line is that no one was ever brought to justice for the little
girl's death. The list of suspects was a long one. It included both of her parents, who
were officially exonerated, along with her older brother Burke, who has maintained his innocence.
"Did you hit your sister over the head with a baseball bat or a flashlight?"
"Absolutely not."
Other suspects included a convicted sex offender and drifter named Gary Oliva and
a local electrician, both of whom were cleared on the basis of DNA. Then there
was a teacher who gave a confession that was ultimately deemed false,
their housekeeper, whose involvement was based on only circumstantial evidence,
and a local man who dressed up as the town's Santa. Rolling Stone called the
idea of his involvement "the sensationalized character assassination of a friendly old man."
JonBenét Ramsey's murder remains unsolved.
Not all unsolved mysteries involve murder, so let's look at one that's just downright
weird. On August 7, 1994, residents of Oakville, Washington woke to a strange sight. Overnight,
weird, gelatinous blobs had fallen from the sky and covered everything.
They weren't just gross, reports the BBC's Science Focus, they were also dangerous.
"Oh! Oh! Ohhh!"
Residents blamed the blobs for the flu-like sickness that quickly started making the rounds.
Doctors recorded higher-than-normal instances of inner ear problems, major respiratory problems,
and vertigo in the days after the event. Some, like Beverly Roberts, suffered such bad vertigo
that she had to crawl to her car to make it to the doctor. She was hospitalized for a week.
"Everybody in the whole town came down with like a flu, only it was a really hard flu,
it didn't last like seven days, it lasted like seven weeks, two or three months."
Even more disturbing were the deaths of any animals who happened to eat the
jelly. They died almost immediately after ingesting the substance. Death
came with vomiting green foam, and scores met this tragic fate.
There's never been a satisfactory explanation for what the jellies were,
and yes, they've been analyzed. The results cleared up absolutely nothing. The official
results from the Washington Department of Health said that the blobs contained
illness-causing bacteria but, weirdly, none of the illnesses any of the victims suffered,
along with white blood cells of human origin. No one has any idea what was going on.
Employees at the Las Cruces Bowling Alley were getting ready to open on February 10,
1990, when two men forced their way in and told the manager, Stephanie Senac,
her 12-year-old daughter, and her daughter's 13-year-old friend to get on the floor. After
another employee, Steve Teran, walked in with his 2- and 6-year-old daughters,
the killing began. Teran and his daughters were killed instantly,
and although Senac survived, she later died of complications. Amy Houser, 13, was also killed.
The two men left with somewhere around $5,000, and were never caught. Law enforcement — and the
families of the victims — are still hopeful that they might be brought to justice someday, because
while there was no DNA evidence recovered, there were plenty of fingerprints. Teran's brother,
Anthony, is pretty sure they won't see justice. He told the Las Cruces Sun News:
Between 1993 and 1998, women disappeared from an area of Ireland that was given the name of
the "Vanishing Triangle." The points of the triangle were in the counties of Wexford,
Louth, and Offaly, and within the bounds of those points, at least eight women vanished — some in
broad daylight — and were never seen or heard from again. Remains have never been discovered,
and according to what writer Claire McGowan found when she wrote a book on the cold case,
it's not even clear just how many women there are.
The usual number is eight, and their stories are varied. Deirdre Jacob, for example,
vanished from just outside of her home, in the middle of the afternoon. Ciara Breen was 17 when
she vanished one night, and Annie McCarrick was an American student last seen at a pub in the
Dublin Mountains. McGowan found others that fit the same profile: 15-year-old Arlene Atkinson
from Castlederg, for example. McGowan suspects a serial killer. She told The Irish Times:
Without remains, though, that's made it tough to connect the victims or even start
trying to compile suspect lists. There have never been any arrests or trials,
but they haven't been forgotten.