Murder, death, and strange disappearances.
What sent a beam of light from space? And who was behind the soft drink spokesman
who took over TV and showed his butt live on air? The '80s don't get stranger than this.
If you ever wondered why over-the-counter medicine is so hard to get into, from foil
seals to cotton-ball stoppers, it can be traced to one of the most notorious unsolved mysteries
in American law enforcement. The Tylenol Murders were a series of suspicious deaths occurring in
and around the Chicago area in 1982. The seven fatalities had no pattern but autopsies determined
that all the victims had taken the pain-reliever Tylenol just before they died. According to PBS,
officials discovered the pills involved had been laced with potassium cyanide.
"We've been receiving calls about once every 15 seconds.
At the Rush-Presbyterian of St. Lukes, we only have three poison lines."
The CDC lists potassium cyanide as a chemical asphyxiant that can kill with extreme swiftness.
It's an incredibly adept chemical, with applications in mining,
jewelry making, and fumigation.
According to Crime Museum, Johnson & Johnson reacted at once, releasing a massive public
warning, halting production, and yanking 31 million bottles of Tylenol off the shelves.
The investigation determined the tampering of pills occurred
from different factories and only after they left for sale,
but no suspect was ever identified. Congress made drug tampering a federal offense, but the
police remain stumped. The case remains open, but Tylenol quickly changed their advertising.
"Tylenol, safety sealed for your protection."
He was a victim of the Cold War. This is the
most plausible theory behind the mystery of Vladimir Alexandrov .
According to El Pais, Alexandrov confirmed the American hypothesis of a nuclear winter,
a massive global temperature drop stemming from a nuclear war. It turned him into an
overnight science superstar. Unusual for a Soviet scientist at the time,
Alexandrov was allowed extensive international travel privileges to collaborate in the United
States and Europe. Things unspooled in 1985, when Alexandrov, then 47, traveled to Spain.
He gave a talk in Córdoba, and then moved on to Madrid, where he had a meeting with Soviet
officials. Journalist Andrew Revkin documented that the meeting left Alexandrov so shaken,
he went on a drinking bender. Revkin confirmed that Alexandrov was habitually inebriated.
And then Vladimir Alexandrov vanished. No note, no body. According to El Pais,
the conspiracy theories were vast, like the KGB killed him for becoming too Americanized,
or the CIA killed him for being a Soviet spy. But the scientist disappeared so completely that
nothing made sense. The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 led to no opening of records on Alexandrov,
and a 2016 article at PulitzerCenter.org concludes Alexandrov is dead. But no one knows for sure.
Scientific American states:
"It's not aliens. In fact, it is never aliens."
But no list of unsolved mysteries is complete without them.
The Rendlesham Forest Incident is the U.K.'s most famous UFO legend. In 1980, American soldiers
stationed at RAF Woodbridge reported seeing unidentified lights in the sky descending into
the nearby Rendlesham Forest. And according to the BBC, the same thing happened two days later.
Locals then reported a pair of suited men appearing and asking if anyone had seen anything.
"Do you want to report a UFO? Over."
"Negative."
According to the BBC, the incident slipped into obscurity until three years later,
when the famously sensational News of the World tabloid ran a story,
based on a real USAF document, that a UFO landed in England. The story gained more traction when
The Guardian reported on Rendlesham in 1985. As the BBC describes, the locals scoff at
the idea and that the beam from the Orford Ness Lighthouse was likely the lightsource.
But why spoil the fun? There's a UFO walking trail at Rendlesham, and the mystery is the
source of several books, even a movie. But what exactly happened that night in 1980? No one knows.
Natalie Wood was a Hollywood rarity: a child star who became a box-office smash as an adult,
with roles in Rebel Without A Cause and West Side Story. According to IMDb, Wood had three
Golden Globes wins and three Oscar nominations. But like Marylin Monroe before her, Wood's death
is so fraught with theories and conspiracies that she's possibly more famous for dying than acting.
According to the Los Angeles Times, in 1981, Wood, her husband, actor Robert
Wagner, and their friend, actor Christopher Walken, took a nighttime cruise on a yacht.
Then Wood, who had been drinking and could not swim, vanished. Wagner radioed in his
wife's disappearance at 1:30 a.m. and her body was recovered later that morning.
Town & Country states that Wagner found that both Wood and the dinghy attached to the yacht were
missing. The coroner found bruising on Wood's body consistent with a fall and her death was listed
as accidental. But the case was reopened in 2011 after new details emerged, and a new witness came
forward in 2018. In 2012, The Guardian stated that Wood's cause of death was changed from an
accident to "drowning and other undetermined factors." No one has been formally charged,
as of yet. But 41 years later, the mysterious death of Natalie Wood remains unsolved.
On November 22, 1987, Chicago was left bewildered when the nightly
news on WGN-TV was suddenly replaced by a figure wearing a Max Headroom mask.
For background, Max Headroom was an icon of the 1980s. The Verge describes the character
as a dystopian, deconstructionist critique of corporate greed. The figure remained silent and
merely bobbed on screen for 25 seconds before station engineers re-established control.
Then it happened again. Chicago-area PBS
affiliate WTTW-11 was hacked two hours later by the same figure,
who now spoke in a stream-of-consciousness ramble through a voice-distortion effect for two minutes.
"Next on CBS…"
Along with the gibberish, the hacker signed off by giving viewers an eyeful
when he mooned the camera and was spanked by a woman with a fly swatter.
The Max Headroom hack has gone down in history as one of the most infamous signal piratings
in American television, augmented by the fact no one knows who did it. Atlas Obscura describes how,
in 2010, a Reddit user went into astonishingly exact detail on why the hack was performed,
claiming that two unnamed techies wanted to demonstrate the vulnerability of American
technology. The claims made were never confirmed.
On December 12, 1985, 248 American soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division,
nicknamed the Screaming Eagles, died in Newfoundland, Canada, when their plane,
Arrow Flight 1285, fell from the sky and crashed. The crash killed everyone on board,
including the eight crewmembers. The Fort Campbell Courier reported,
"The crash [...] was the largest single-day tragedy with loss of
life in Screaming Eagle history."
Even as families mourned and communities rallied,
the Canadian Aviation Safety Board rushed to figure out how the plane,
not 1,000 feet off the ground, suddenly crashed. There was no indication of general wrongdoing
concerning Arrow Flight 1285 and the mystery lacks a good theory that everyone accepts.
According to the Fort Campbell Courier, the crash was officially blamed on ice buildup due
to the notoriously harsh Newfoundland winter. But the CBC claimed that an
investigator was so unconvinced of those findings that he filed a minority report.
A similar article from the Cape Cod Times stated that an explosion in the cargo hold actually took
Arrow Flight 1285 down. And some reports say that the flight originated in the Middle East,
leading some to raise questions of terrorism, UPI noted. The cause remains a mystery.
How does a man get shot dead in broad daylight — a
crime witnessed by 60 people — and no suspect gets caught?
All-out criminal Ken Rex McElroy terrorized the people of Skidmore,
Missouri. According to local affiliate Fox 2, the man was suspected of "theft,
livestock rustling, burglary, arson, assault [...] and child molestation."
He impregnated a 12-year-old girl, and, to avoid statutory charges,
married the child after an intimidation campaign against her parents. As Fox reports,
intimidation was how McElroy got away with 20 charges against him,
with crimes going back into the 1970s. According to Bustle, McElroy successfully, and suspiciously,
appealed a murder conviction in July of 1981. He then died in a hail of bullets.
No one called an ambulance. No one rushed to help. No one saw a thing. The case and
the wall of silence around the incident made headlines. Bustle alleges that McElroy earned
the hatred of Skidmore so completely, not only did the entire town conspire to kill him, people
refused to point fingers. The New York Times reports witnesses admitting seeing the shooting
occur but not the shooter, and that the people of Skidmore have no desire to see the case progress.
"Who pulled the trigger?"
"I don't know."
"I couldn't tell you."
"Would you turn in the person who did it?"
"No."
Starting in 1987, an unknown man in a black balaclava started a serial spree of child
sexual assaults, abductions, and at least one murder, across the city of Melbourne that has kept
Australia on edge ever since. Dubbed Mr. Cruel by the press, the police identified only a very basic
modus operandi: each victim was monitored before the attack. Abducted victims were later found by
electrical substations, leading to the assumption Mr. Cruel worked for the power authority.
According to the Herald Sun, each of the 12 attacks was careful and unhurried.
A conscientious and self-aware criminal, Mr.Cruel even went so far as to provide
false leads. While surviving victims were able to provide some information,
the Herald Sun details how each was gagged and carefully blindfolded, limiting their abilities.
In 1991, the attacks suddenly stopped, leaving police no closer to solving the case. According to
the Herald Sun, seven suspects were identified by law enforcement but no progress was made on any.
With no new leads, the task force assigned to Mr. Cruel disbanded in 1994
and in the decades since, some sources question if Mr. Cruel is still alive.
Arguably the most famous missing person of the decade, Toledo, Ohio resident Cynthia
Anderson was a stereotypical church-going good girl. On an ordinary day in 1981,
she disappeared into thin air. And she hasn't been seen or heard from since.
According to the case file with the Ohio Attorney General, Anderson, a legal secretary,
had prepared the working day for her superiors. The radio was on and an unfinished romance novel
was on her desk. The Charley Project states that Anderson's purse and keys were missing,
but her locked car was still in the parking lot. There was no sign of a struggle and the office
door was locked. The Toronto Blade notes calls to the office started going unanswered at 10 a.m.
She also had placemarked her book at a scene involving an abduction by knifepoint.
The strongest clue was that Anderson was subject to a series of disturbing phone
calls and eerie messages. Parade reveals that the words "I love you, Cindy," signed by "GW,"
had been spray-painted on the opposite wall of her office. The stalking behavior
unsettled Anderson so much that an alarm buzzer was installed at her work place.
It was never used. Police were stumped. According to The Charley Project, suspects were pursued,
including convicted felons, but to no avail. Anderson was gone. The case remains open.
According to a Plumas County News retrospective from April 2018, the signed message,
"I've paid the price of your love & now I've bought it with four people's lives"
…is considered all but a confession to the Keddie Cabin Murders, a brutal family slaying in 1981.
Two suspects were even identified. But the case still went cold.
ThoughtCo reports that the bodies of Glenna "Sue" Sharp, her son John Sharp,
and his friend Dana Wingate were discovered killed in a cabin in the small northern
California community of Keddie. Missing was the Sharp daughter, 12-year-old Tina,
whose remains were found in the woods three years later. Found at the scene were the
murder weapons and, astonishingly, the three other children who went the entire episode
unharmed in another room. Plumas County News has authorities surmising at least two perpetrators,
but a piece published a week earlier says as many as six could be involved.
Authorities looked at Martin Smartt, who wrote the quotation, and Severin John Boubede
for connections. As ThoughtCo observes, police infighting froze the case so thoroughly that it
remains unsolved to this day. The Sacramento Bee noted new technology is shedding some light, but
both Smartt and Boubede have since died, dimming hopes for justice. In a 2016 interview with
People, survivor Sheila Sharp said she just wants answers. Sharp said of the newly found evidence:
"I actually put in my mind that I'll probably go to my grave, that it would never be solved."
Sometimes a criminal case becomes an enduring mystery because the facts seem so ludicrous.
In 1989, the Fukushima authorities in Japan suspected Naoyuki Kanno died in a ladies room
septic tank of hypothermia in a failed attempt to watch women in the restroom.
While this would seem like an extreme Peeping Tom case, the surrounding facts don't add up.
According to DayDayNews, townsfolk immediately came to Kanno's defense when police announced
the predatory theory, saying he was a father and an apparent pillar of the community.
But no one knows how he got into the tank in the first place. The C-shaped industrial pipe was so
cramped that the 26-year-old Kanno was wedged inside. Kanno was found on his back in a fetal
position, shirtless, holding a neatly folded jacket to his chest, with no outward injuries.
He would have been looking up\ into the urinal, and he ultimately ended up freezing to death.
Dissatisfied with the official findings, 4,000 locals demanded the case be re-investigated.
No further clues were found and no suspects were ever identified. The case remains cold.
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