- Hi, my name's Terry Meurer.
I'm the co-creator and executive producer
of Unsolved Mysteries.
And I'm going to share with you how we find
the stories that we produce for the series.
(Unsolved Mysteries theme music)
There's a lot of different ways that stories come to us.
We have story submissions that come in
from viewers who watch the episodes.
And we have a team that goes through
all of those submissions to try and find
the strongest mysteries and the most viable mysteries.
We have had hundreds and hundreds of stories
submitted to us.
And as the executive producer of the show,
probably the most challenging part of my job
is the story selection,
and which stories are we going to tell.
When we begin a season of Unsolved Mysteries,
we usually have all the stories chosen
before we start production.
We want to always make sure that we have
a variety of different kinds of mysteries.
So a murder, a wanted,
a missing persons case, an unexplained death,
and a paranormal case.
Because we feel like that the viewers
want a variety of mysteries.
And everybody isn't interested in exactly the same mystery.
We look for a combination of stories,
international and domestic both.
We look for rural and urban.
We look for diversity in race, and in culture,
and in ethnicity, and age.
Volume two we have a case of
the Washington insider John Wheeler
who's very high profile in Washington D.C.
And we also have missing children from a park in Harlem.
We want the audience to feel like they're looking at
a variety of different people from all walks of life.
In volume one,
the story of Lena Chapin,
it's the missing witness episode,
that story came to us through Lena's sister Brandi,
who reached out to us and wanted us to do her story.
- I miss her.
I miss her so much it kills me.
- We get story submissions from law enforcement too
because they know that by getting their case
on Unsolved Mysteries, there's a really good chance
that it will get solved.
Lester Eubanks is an example of that,
the case of death row fugitive which is in volume two.
The US Marshals reached out to us
and asked us if we would do that story.
At the Unsolved Mysteries offices,
we have what we kind of call a war room.
It's basically a conference room
that is surrounded by cork board, by bulletin board.
And we put all the stories that are contenders
up on that board and we just kind of move them around
and try and figure out what the best
combination of stories would be.
The twists and turns and the questions
that we ask in our story meeting,
we know are questions that the audience is going to ask.
And so when we all start engaging
in a conversation about a story,
we know that the audience will as well.
When we choose a story,
it's important to us that all the people
involved in the story want the story to be told
and want to participate.
So we do respect people who prefer not to have
that publicity and that notoriety.
There are a lot of people who just
have lived with the pain, and the tragedy,
and the loss for so long.
It is very hard for them to talk about it again
and to have all the publicity and to have their hopes
raised again because they're afraid
that the case still won't be solved.
After we find an Unsolved Mysteries story
that we feel would make a strong episode,
we go out and scout the story.
We meet the people
who we are going to interview in the story.
We look at the locations and we just make sure
that all the pieces are going to come together.
We always shoot all the episodes on location
because we feel like that gives it
an authenticity that we wouldn't get
if we just shot everything in one location.
So scouting the stories is very important.
We come back, we write up a rough outline
of how that story would go together,
and then we put that into production.
We always have a lot of footage,
a lot of interview material especially to go through.
And we don't have a narrator anymore
as we did with the original episodes with Robert Stack.
So the interviewees themselves
are the ones that are telling the stories.
We've done a lot of mysteries.
Over the years we've done over 1,300 cases.
A lot of people will say,
oh, these stories are so sad, and they're so tragic,
and how do you do this after all these years?
And I think the thing that keeps us going
is the hope that we can solve these mysteries.
That's why we do what we do.
This is often the court of last resort.
Their cases have gone cold
and there's not a lot of attention on these cases.
And we come in and we shine a light on those cases
and see if we can reinvigorate the investigation
and bring in some more leads.
That's how we choose stories here at Unsolved Mysteries.
So check out volume two now streaming on Netflix.