Unsolved Murder

The Kabukichou Love Hotel Murders

/ Tristan / 6 Comments
Kabukicho

Between March and June 1981, Tokyo’s red-light district was the sight of three unsolved murders, all of which occurred in love hotels.

Back in the 1980s, Akina Nakamori was one of the biggest pop stars in Japan. Compared to the other idol giant of the time, sweet goody two-shoes Seiko Matsuda, Nakamori sang gloomy songs about being a rebel and getting your heart broken. Recently, while exploring Nakamori’s back catalog, I heard a pretty catchy song called Shoujo A.

The title of the song literally means “Girl A,” but as one translator rendered it, it might better be understood in English as “Jane Doe.” In the Japanese media, for the sake of anonymity, names might sometimes be given as vague pseudonyms like Mr. A, Victim B, or Housewife C. In Nakamori’s song, the 17-year-old narrator calls herself Shoujo A, a nobody who isn’t special and can be found anywhere.

Now legend has it that Shoujo A was inspired by a series of unsolved murders in Tokyo’s infamous red-light district, Kabukichou. These murders, which all might have been committed by the same man, happened a year before the song’s release. The third victim was known as Shoujo A, and like the narrator of the Nakamori hit, was only 17-years-old.

Regardless of whether this is true or not, the story behind the rumor is an interesting one. Between March and June 1981, three women were killed in different love hotels in Kabukichou. The first body was found on the morning of March 20. The victim, Hostess A, had checked into the room with a young man the night before.

When it was coming time for check-out, the room didn’t answer the hotel’s calls. An employee sent to go check the room found Hostess A dead and alone. The cause of death was strangulation. A business card, belonging to Hostess A, identified her as a 33-year-old hostess at a local cabaret.

The name on the card, however, turned out to be a fake one.

Continue reading →

The Boy in the Box

/ Tristan / 19 Comments

(Note: I will now be updating Bizarre and Grotesque every Monday and Friday. Articles will be posted at 12 AM, Eastern Time.)

BoyintheBox

The Boy in the Box, also known as America’s Unknown Child, was a young boy who was found dead inside a cardboard box in a rural part of Philadelphia in February 1957.

On February 25, 1957, a college student walking through a field in the countryside of Philadelphia’s Fox Chase neighborhood found a cardboard packing box on a pile of garbage. When the student looked inside the box, he discovered the body of a small boy covered in a blanket. The boy was naked, and there were bruises all over his body. According to the boy’s autopsy, he was killed from being hit in the head. It was hard to say what his age was, but he seemed to be between the ages of 4 and 6. Although fairly clean, the boy only weighed 30 pounds and had a very crude haircut.

The authorities hoped “The Boy in the Box” would be a quick case to solve. Aside from the boy’s blanket and box, they also had a hat that was found close-by. The box was eventually traced to a J.C. Penny’s 15 miles away. It was used to store a bassinet, and the store had  received and sold a dozen units. Thanks to media publicity, eight of the customers who bought the bassinets contacted the police. The other four never came forward though, and the J.C. Penny’s that sold the bassinets was unable to provide any receipts or records that could help identify them.

Tracing back the hat also came to a dead-end. The owner of the store where it was made said the buyer was a single man who paid with cash and looked to be around 26 between 30-years-old. This man was never identified, and nobody else in the area recognized the hat. The Boy in the Box’s blanket also proved to be unrecognizable. It was cheap and made from flannel, and it seemed to be the only copy of its kind. The three big clues investigators had ultimately came to nothing.

Box

The cardboard box in which the boy was found.

Over 400,000 posters depicting the boy’s face were distributed across the United States. No relatives, friends, or neighbors the boy might have had ever came forward. His fingerprints turned up nothing, and his appearance did not match with the descriptions of any known missing children.

Nobody could say how long the boy had been dead. There was actually an earlier man who found the body before the college student did, but he did not contact the police or remember the date. On the 24th, the day before the Boy in the Box was found the second time, a driver passing through the area reported seeing a boy and woman standing aside the road with a car. The witness thought the woman’s car might have broke down, but she sent him away with a wave of her hand. The kid the driver saw might very well have been the Boy in the Box before he was killed.

Some have wondered whether the boy was living under the radar, unnoticed by society at large. Perhaps his family was very poor, or maybe he was an orphan living in an abusive home. Remington Bristow, one of the case’s original investigators, believed that the boy’s death was connected to a local foster home. He suggested that the boy belonged to the foster father’s stepdaughter, but a DNA test in the 1990s later disproved this theory.

tombstone

The grave of the Boy in the Box.

Another theory emerged in 2002, when a mentally-ill woman identified only as “M” claimed that her parents killed the Boy in the Box. The boy’s real name was “Jonathan,” and M’s parents had bought him from his birth family. Jonathan was subjected to horrific sexual and physical abuse for the next two years. One day, after throwing up in the bathroom, Jonathan had his head slammed against the floor by M’s mother. He died from the attack, and M and her mother then hid the body in the box where Jonathan was found.

After pulling over and getting out of their car, M and her mother were stopped by a passing motorist. What happened next is somewhat consistent to the account of the old witness who reported seeing a woman and boy near the spot where the Boy in the Box’s body was found. According to M, the man thought they were having car trouble, but her mother ignored him. She waited for the man to leave, and then they took Jonathan out of the car and hid his body in the cardboard box.

M’s account was quite detailed, but authorities had trouble believing it due to her mental illness. Neighbors who had known M’s family also disputed her claims. In more recent years, authors Jim Hoffman and Louis Romano believe they have traced the Boy in the Box to a family from Memphis, Tennessee. As of March 2016, they are looking to do a DNA test to confirm their findings.

 

 

The Macastre Murders

/ Tristan / 2 Comments
Macastre

In January 1989, Rosario Gayete Moedra, her boyfriend Francisco Valeriano Flores Sanchez and their friend Pilar Ruiz Barriga were murdered under mysterious circumstances in Macastre, Spain.

On January 19, 1989, a farmer in the small town of Macastre, Spain went into his shed and found the corpse of a teenage girl lying in his bed. The girl was identified as 15-year-old Rosario Gayete Moedra, who had left her home five days earlier to go on a camping trip with her friend Pilar Ruiz Barriga (also 15) and boyfriend Francisco Valeriano Flores Sanchez (14). The three teens were from Valencia, and had a history of doing drugs and getting into trouble. Nobody had seen them since the day they went camping.

According to Rosario’s autopsy, she had died from cardiac arrest, probably triggered by a drug overdose of something. The authorities speculated that Rosario and her friends stayed in the shed to escape the cold weather. While resting in the shed, Rosario took an untraceable drug and overdosed. Francisco and Pilar then ran out of the cabin, either looking for help or fleeing the scene. The Civil Guard, Spain’s national police force, launched a search looking for them.

On January 27, a woman found an amputated foot in a waste container in Valencia. The police suspected it belonged to one of the missing Macastre teens. On April 8, Francisco’s body turned up in some bushes located less than a mile from where Rosario was found. His autopsy was inconclusive, but he might have died from the same untraceable drug Rosario took. (Note: Some sites claim that Francisco was badly beaten and shot, but I’m not sure whether that’s a rumor or not. I’ve also read that his body might have appeared after the Civil Guard searched the area. It’d be quite shocking if they missed Francisco during their initial search.)

On May 24, a group of children passing by a river in near-by Turis discovered the body of a mutilated young woman. The corpse, which seemed to be between 15 and 17 years of age, had its missing right hand and left foot cut off by a chainsaw. The face was too disfigured to tell who it was, but investigators eventually ruled that the body was Pilar’s. Pilar’s family, however, refused to accept that the body was hers. They pointed out that the body had a scar which Pilar didn’t have, and insisted that she was still missing.

In 1999, the case took another strange turn when some skeletal remains were found in Macastre. A DNA test of the remains with Pilar’s sister showed a match. Whether the body found in Turis was really Pilar’s is still up for debate, but the discovery in May 1989 shifted the focus of the case into a murder investigation. Francisco and Rosario might have been intentionally poisoned. A few days before Rosario’s body was found, witnesses reported seeing her and her friends at a local bar in Macastre.

Macastre, interestingly, is an hour away from where the teens planned to camp. It seems that somebody must have given them a ride. This person might have taken them to the bar, and then led them to the shed where Rosario was found. Whether voluntarily or by force, Francisco and Rosario died after ingesting something lethal or poisonous. Pilar presumably tried to escape, but was killed and dismembered. According to the teens’ autopsies, all three of them died between January 16-17, 1989.

There is still a lot of interest in this case today, but the authorities have yet to uncover any big leads or suspects. Some armchair sleuths have suggested a connection to the Alcasser Murders, an incident in 1992 in which three teenage girls were brutally raped and murdered near Valencia. While their murderers were officially caught, one of the men escaped and is still on the run. The investigation was filled with a countless number of problems and unanswered questions, however, and there are a bunch of conspiracy theories that claim the girls were killed for a snuff film or Satanic ritual.

Check out my book “Mexico’s Unsolved Mysteries: True Stories of Ghosts, Monsters, and UFOs from South of the Border” for more interesting mysteries of the Spanish-speaking world.  You can buy the book on Kindle here. 

 

The Crow and the Unsolved Murder of Grégory Villemin

/ Tristan / 6 Comments
gregory

Picture of Gregory Villemin.

For several years in the early 1980s, an unknown man repeatedly harassed and threatened Jean-Marie Villemin and his family in hundreds of letters and phone calls. The man, nicknamed Le Corbeau (“The Crow”) by the media, especially hated Jean-Marie. The Crow not only knew tiny details about Jean-Marie, like how he was a factory foreman, but also intimate family secrets. “Every single word we said at home,” remarked a relative to the media, “he knew.”

On the afternoon of October 16, 1984, Jean-Marie’s 4-year-old son Grégory went out to play in front of the family’s rural home in Vosges. A half-hour later, The Crow called up Grégory’s uncle and boasted of taking the little boy and putting him in the Vologne river. Police launched a massive search effort, finding Grégory’s body, his hands and feet tied up with rope, in the Vologne the same night.

gregory2

Gregory’s parents, Jean-Marie and Christine.

The next day, an anonymous letter that had been sent the day before arrived for Jean-Marie. It read, “I hope you die of grief, boss. Your money can’t give you back your son. Here is my revenge, you stupid bastard.”

After taking handwriting samples from Jean-Marie’s family, police suspected that the murderer was one of his cousins, a 30-year-old man named Bernard Laroche. Laroche, it was suggested, had a grudge against Jean-Marie because Laroche was less financially successful and had a mentally-retarded son. Laroche was taken into police custody the next month, after his sister-in-law told police that she had seen Laroche driving with Grégory.

bernard

Bernard Laroche, a cousin of Jean-Marie, was the initial suspect in the case.

The case seemed like it was just about solved, but Laroche denied having anything to do with Grégory’s murder. In February 1985, his sister-in-law admitted that she had only accused her brother-in-law because she was pressured by the police. Laroche was deemed innocent and let go. Jean-Marie, however, was not convinced. He openly announced to the media that he would kill Laroche, and sure enough, fatally shot his cousin a month later.

Jean-Marie was sentenced to five years in prison for Laroche’s murder. He told the authorities that it was revenge for Laroche killing his son. Laroche swore on his death-bed that he was innocent, and a few months after his death, another letter from The Crow arrived at Jean-Marie’s parents’ house. The killer was still on the loose, and vowed to “do the Villemin family in.”

gregory4

After the death of Bernard Laroche Christine Villemin was the next major suspect. She later wrote a book declaring her innocence.

 

Meanwhile, Grégory’s mother Christine had become the main focus of the investigation. Not only did her handwriting show some similarities to the letter sent the day Grégory was murdered, but she had been spotted at the post office that day too. Police also found cords like the ones used on Grégory in the Villemin’s basement. In July 1985, Christine was detained by the police, but later let go and freed of any charges.

In recent years, investigators have turned to DNA testing in an attempt to identify The Crow and Grégory’s killer. In a DNA test conducted in 2009 on the last Crow letter, investigators found the prints of a man on the letter itself, and another set of prints from a woman on the letter’s stamp. Neither set of DNA prints matched with Gregory’s parents, although some have dismissed the prints anyway, arguing that they could belong to anybody who touched the letter.

Some 30 years later, Grégory Villemin’s murder remains controversial and hotly debated. There are still people who believe that Bernard Laroche was the killer, while others insist that it was Christine Villemin.

UPDATE: (7/27/17)

In June 2017, Grégory Villemin’s great aunt and uncle, Jacqueline and Marcel Jacob, were charged with his kidnapping. Based on handwriting analysis of The Crow’s letters, police believe that the Jacobs are the culprits. It seems jealously was the motive, although Marcel Jacobs’ lawyer has said that there isn’t any material proof against the couple. I’ll continue to add updates as more information becomes available.

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6 Creepy Unsolved Japanese Murders

/ Tristan / 10 Comments

I’ve noticed that my posts about Japan receive a lot more traffic than I usually get, so I’ve decided I’m going to embark on a series of lists about unsolved Japanese murders. Most of the cases that will be featured here have never appeared in English media before. Some of them are quite obscure, but I’ve tried to find as much relevant information that I could. 

6. The Haga Futon Bag Murder

Police sketch of a man found inside a futon bag in

Police sketch of a man found inside a futon bag in Japan’s Tochigi Prefecture. (Image source/credit here.)

On April 21, 1996, while coming home from school, a group of junior high school students were looking through a bamboo grove in the Haga district of Tochigi Prefecture when they noticed a barely-closed futon bag. The kids had seen the bag laying there for almost a month, and curious about what might be inside, one of them poked it with a stick. A human hand then drooped out. The bag, it turned out, contained the body of a middle-aged man.

According to the autopsy, the man had been dead about a month when his body was discovered. He was bruised on his waist, and some of his front teeth were missing. He appeared to be between the ages of 40 and 50. The man was about 5 foot 11, and weighed 150 pounds. He had an O blood type. His clothes consisted of a dark blue jacket, a gray shirt with a green tie, and a gray pair of paints.

Investigators found the surname “Yamamoto” written on the bottom side of the tag of his pants, and the Japanese word for “next” on the other side. Despite these mysterious messages, the man has never been identified. In 2010, a sign was put up on the spot where the unidentified man’s body was found. Police hope that it might someday lead to his identification.

5. The Murder of Yoko Yoshida

Picture of Yoko Yoshida from when she was a high school student.

Picture of Yoko Yoshida from when she was a high school student. (Image source/credit here.)

On September 29, 2000, around 1 PM, a census taker collecting information in a Tokyo apartment complained to management about a room that had a terrible smell coming from it. When management sent a janitor to check the room out, he found that the door was unlocked. Inside, he found the body of the woman who was living there, a 28-year-old manga artist named Yoko Yoshida.

Yoshida, who lived alone, was laying on her back on her bed, wearing only a t-shirt. As the autopsy determined, Yoshida had been strangled to death. She had been dead for at least 10 days by the time her body was discovered. Her room showed no signs of disarray and nothing appeared to have been taken. 3 million yen and a receipt from a convenience store dated September 18th were found in her purse and wallet.

Pictures of Yoko Yoshida and the apartment she was staying at.

Pictures of Yoko Yoshida and the apartment she was staying at. (Image source/credit here.)

Police suspect that Yoshida had known her killer, and since she was a manga artist, some suggest that she was killed by a crazed fan. Yoshida had been active in the dojinshi (self-publishing) community since she graduated high school. Her killer might very well have been somebody she knew, but police have never been able to find any shady acquaintances or witnesses.

4. The Murder of Kaori Hirohata

The site where Kaori Hirohata's body was discovered.

The site where Kaori Hirohata’s body was discovered. (Image source/ credit here.)

On June 24, 2013, a member of a parking cleaning staff found the body of a middle-aged woman lying in a bush outside an apartment complex in Narashino city in Chiba Prefecture. Her belongings were found scattered around her body. Her ID identified her as Kaori Hirohata, a resident of the complex who hadn’t been seen since the day before. Although Hirohata participated in a local community event that day, she never showed up to work that evening.  

According to the autopsy results, Hirohata had been choked to death. Her upper body also showed marks of being beaten. Since Hirohata’s purse was found to be empty, the motive appeared to have been robbery. Her body was very lazily hidden, with her feet visibly sticking out of a bush. It’s likely she was dragged to the location from somewhere else.

A model of what Kaori Hirohata was dressed like the day she died.

A model of what Kaori Hirohata was dressed like the day she died.

If Hirohata really was the victim of a robbery, one has to wonder why the killer used his bare hands? Interestingly, the spot where she was found was part of her commune to work. Hirohata’s killer might have known her schedule. For information that could lead to the killer’s arrest, police are currently offering a reward of 3 million yen.

3. The Murder of the Sunamis

A policeman handing out flyers about the Sunami murders.

A policeman handing out flyers about the murder of Haruhiko and Midori Sunami. (Image source/credit here.)

On the morning of April 28, 1995, around 2:30 AM, a house in Kurashiki Kojima had been set on fire. Authorities discovered two bodies on the first floor, the remains of 70-year-old Haruhiko Sunami and his 67-year-old wife Midori. Both had been decapitated. Haruhiko also had a knife lodged into his stomach, and later evaluation of Midori found that she had been stabbed in the chest and several other spots. They are believed to have died the previous night, sometime between 5 PM and 9 PM.

Because the fire destroyed much of the house and subsequently any evidence that might have been found there, authorities have had little clues to lead them to the Sunamis’ killer. Police thought their killing might have been the result of a dispute, but this was never established. The killer might have been familiar with the house, or at least had been in it before.

For whatever reason, the killer was in the Sunamis’ house for at least 5 hours after he killed them. Could he have been looking for something? And why did he think it necessary to cut off the Sunamis’ heads, neither of which have turned up in the 20 years since the murder occurred?

2. The Murder of Makiko Tsuchiyama

Picture of the city of Higashi-osaka. (Image source/credit here.)

Picture of the city of Higashi-osaka. (Image source/credit here.)

On November 21, 1984, around 2:10 PM, a 2-year-old girl named Makiko Tsuchiyama was found fallen on her face in a drainage ditch in an alley behind her home in Higashi-osaka city.  Makiko was unconscious, and her neck seemed as though it had been strangled with a cord. Although she was rushed to the hospital, Makiko died 9 hours after being taken there.

The fact that Makiko had been playing outside by herself wasn’t unusual in the neighborhood, since other children and mothers were often outside too. Nobody, however, had seen Makiko’s murderer. Eerily, Makiko had been found unconscious on the same spot a month earlier. She had been strangled that time too, with the marks of a string around her neck. Unlike the second time, she had regained consciousness shortly after being taken to the hospital.

Immediately after this first incident, Makiko’s grandfather received a strange phone call from an unidentified woman. The woman was crying hard and speaking incomprehensibly. He tried talking to her for 2 minutes before she suddenly said “I’m sorry” and hung up. Makiko’s grandfather had not yet heard about Makiko’s incident, and thought the woman had gotten the wrong number. For the next few days, he received several more unexplained phone calls. Every time he answered, he heard only silence on the other end.

Police originally thought the first incident was an accident. They concluded that Makiko had gotten her neck hooked around a vinyl strap that had been attached to the door of her house. After Makiko died, however, they decided to launch a criminal investigation. It was strange that Makiko had been found in the alley, since she had refused to go anywhere near it since the first incident. Since there were no scratches on her face, it was suspected that somebody lured Makiko away and then strangled her in a different location. In the 30 years since Makiko’s death, neither her killer or the mysterious woman who called her grandfather have been identified.

1. The Murder of the Miyazawas

A picture of the Miyazawa family.

A picture of the Miyazawa family. (Image source/credit here.)

On the morning of December 31, 2000, a relative of the Miyazawa family in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward found father Mikio, his wife Yasuko, their daughter Niina, and their son Rei dead in their home. While Rei had been strangled in his bedroom, the other three members of the family had been stabbed to death in two different parts of the house.

The Setagaya police offering prayers at the Miyazawa home. (Image source/credit here.)

The Setagaya police offering prayers at the Miyazawa home. (Image source/credit here.)

Authorities speculate that the killer had gotten into the home from a bathroom window on the second floor of the house around 11:30 PM. He went into Rei’s room and strangled him as he slept. Mikio was found on the first floor near the staircase, possibly coming up the stairs after he heard the intruder making noise. The female Miyazawas were killed next.

A publicity campaign by the police to bring awareness about the Miyazawa murders. (Image source credit here.)

A publicity campaign by the Setagaya police to bring awareness about the Miyazawa murders. (Image source/credit here.)

The killer then ransacked the family’s house and stayed there for about 10 hours. He went into the kitchen and took some food from the fridge, and then used the family’s computer for a while. None of the money in the house was taken, but some New Year’s cards were missing. A knife the killer left behind was found, along with a shirt and bag. Additionally, blood was found at the scene that didn’t belong to any of the Miyazawas. After more than 15 years, police have had few clues to catch the Miyazawas’ killer. There is currently a reward of 20 million yen being offered to anybody who could give information that would lead to the killer’s identification.

Be sure to check out more creepy Japanese mysteries in my e-book, 20 Unsolved Mysteries of Japan, available on Amazon for Kindle.

The Case of Jaclyn Dowaliby: An Unreliable Witness and a Wrongly Accused Man

/ Tristan / 22 Comments
Jaclyn Dowaliby. (Image credit/source here.)

Jaclyn Dowaliby. (Image credit/source here.)

On the morning of September 10, 1988, David and Cynthia Dowaliby reported to the police that their 7-year-old daughter Jaclyn had gone missing from their home in Midlothian, Illinois. Jaclyn wasn’t in her bedroom when her parents woke up, and one of the windows in the house’s basement was found broken. The Dowalibys thought somebody must have broken the window from the outside, but the more numerous shards of glass outside suggested to police that the window had been shattered from inside the house. Equally suspicious, how didn’t anybody wake up while the abduction was taking place?

Four days later, Jaclyn’s body was discovered in a field behind an apartment complex. One of the apartment’s residents, Everett Mann, told police that he saw a suspicious Caucasian man in a dark car driving away from the field on the night of Jaclyn’s disappearance. After being shown pictures of the case’s suspects, Mann identified David Dowaliby as the man he saw. David and Cynthia were arrested on November 22, charged with murder and concealing a homicide.

Picture of Jaclyn Dowaliby. (Image credit/source here.)

Picture of Jaclyn Dowaliby. (Image credit/source here.)

Although public opinion was set harshly against the Dowalibys, several investigators behind the scene believed they were innocent. A forensic report confirmed that the basement window in the Dowaliby’s home had been carefully broken from the outside, while Everett Mann’s reliability as a witness came under serious scrutiny. Mann changed the description of the car he saw numerous times, and identified David in the line-up from his nose, which he claimed to have seen 75 yards away in the middle of the night. He was also mentally unwell and suffered from bipolar disorder.

As the Dowaliby trial unfolded, Cynthia was cleared of any wrongdoing in April 1990, but David was convicted of murder nearly a month later. After spending a year in jail, David’s conviction was overturned due to a lack of evidence, and he was released in November 1991. Although the Dowalibys were proven to be innocent, the question still remained of who was guilty of killing their daughter?

Clip from an Unsolved Mysteries segment about Jaclyn's murder.

Clip from an Unsolved Mysteries segment about Jaclyn’s murder.

Before Jaclyn’s body turned up, her biological father, Jimmy Guess, had been the main suspect in the case. Guess had tried abducting Jaclyn before, but he was ruled out once it was discovered that he was in jail during the time for sexually assaulting a woman. After the Dowalibys appeared on an Unsolved Mysteries segment in 1993, authorities received a tip that Guess’s schizophrenic brother Timothy had lied to the police about his alibi on the night Jaclyn was abducted.

When earlier questioned, Guess said that he had spent the evening at an all-night restaurant. Several other people at the restaurant, including two waitresses, reported that Guess was only there for a short while at 9:30. When Guess gave a taped interview to a professor involved in the case, he claimed that he was possessed by a spirit that could make him invisible.

Despite never having been to the Dowaliby’s home, Guess was able to accurately describe the inside of it. At one point, he described in the first-person where Jaclyn’s room was located. When asked how he knew this, Guess explained that the spirit told him. While Guess might very likely have been the killer, Jaclyn’s case is still open. Guess died years ago, and not much has developed since the Dowalibys were let go.

 UPDATE: (5/14/2016)

A Chicago news station recently aired a segment about this case that you can watch here. It doesn’t offer any new leads or tips, but it does include some interviews with the Dowalibys’ attorneys and Jimmy Guess. The Dowalibys were also asked to be interviewed for the segment, but they ignored the invitation. Since being cleared of their daughter’s murder, the Dowalibys have changed their last name and no longer live in Midlothian.

The Case of Russell and Shirley Dermond, an Elderly Couple Brutally Murdered in Their Own Home

/ Tristan / 2 Comments
Picture of Russell and Shirley Dermond. (Image credit source here.)

Picture of Russell and Shirley Dermond. (Image source/credit here.)

88-year-old Russell Dermond and his 87-year-old wife Shirley lived in a $769,000 two-story lake home in the gated community of Great Waters, Georgia. Russell and Shirley were both from New Jersey, but had moved to Great Waters in the late 1990s. They were well-liked by their neighbors, and there was nothing particularly unusual about them. Shirley enjoyed spending her time playing bridge and going to church, and Russell liked to play golf.

On May 3, 2014, the Dermonds were invited to a Kentucky Derby party held by some friends in the neighborhood. Despite earlier saying they would show up, they never made it. Nobody had seen Shirley since the 1st, when she was playing at a bridge club. Russell was spotted at a grocery store that day, and had been seen on a golf course on the 2nd.

The Dermond home. (Image source/credit here.)

The Dermond home. (Image source/credit here.)

On the morning of May 6, after not hearing from the Dermonds for a couple of days, the couple that had thrown the derby party went to their house and found their front door unlocked. There was no immediate sign of the couple, and everything in the house seemed to be in its usual place. After looking through the house, the husband decided to try the Dermonds’ garage. In between the two cars stored there, he found Russell’s body, decapitated and with his head nowhere in sight.

By the time police arrived, there was still no trace of Shirley. Authorities suspected that she had been abducted, but had little hope that she was still alive. On May 16, Shirley’s body was found floating facedown in the near-by lake by two fisherman at a spot about 5 miles away from her home. Her killer had tied her body down with a pair of 30 pound concrete blocks.

The back of the Dermond Home. (Image source/ credit here.)

The back of the Dermond home. (Image source/ credit here.)

According to forensic tests, Shirley had been beaten on the head with something like a hammer. She had been tossed into the lake after she died. The cause of Russell’s death is still undetermined. Without his head, it’s been difficult to figure out how exactly he died. He’s believed to have been beheaded, possibly with a knife, only after he was murdered.

While the Dermonds had no known enemies, that’s not to say that the family hadn’t experienced trouble before. Their son, Mark, had been shot to death on his 47th birthday while buying crack cocaine in 2000. While Mark’s killer was caught, nobody associated with him has been suspected of his parents’ murder. Investigators have poured over the Dermonds’ relatives and friends, even collecting phone conversations and information from their college days, but have yet to find anybody with a possible grudge against them.

Putnam County sheriff Howard Sills, the man in charge of the Dermond case. (Picture credit source here.)

Putnam County sheriff Howard Sills, the man in charge of the Dermond case. (Picture source/credit here here.)

Due to the savage nature of the attacks, the sheriff in charge of the case believes that the Dermonds were murdered by somebody they knew. He’s suggested that the killer came to the house by car or boat. How exactly they got into the house is uncertain. While nothing was missing, the intruder could have demanded something that the Dermonds didn’t have. Rather than the work of a single person, there might have been multiple people involved. An unidentified man was seen on the lawn of the Dermond home around the time of their deaths, but authorities have declined to say anything more than that the man is a person of interest.

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The Case of Carolyn Wasilewski, a Murdered Schoolgirl who was Found with a Mysterious Lipstick Message on Her Thigh

/ Tristan / 11 Comments

Carolyn Wasilewski was a pretty blonde-haired girl who dated and hung around drapes, a variant of the greaser subculture popular in the 1950s. She was a freshman student at Southern High School in Baltimore, Maryland, and was called “Peaches” by her friends.

On November 8, 1954, Carolyn told her family that she was going out to meet her friend Peggy Lamana.  The two girls planned to sign up for a dance program at a local elementary school. Carolyn left her house at 6:15 PM, but never met up with Peggy. Her family got worried, and though they spent all night looking for her, found no trace of Carolyn.

Later that morning, around 7 AM, an engineer on a train passing from Harrisburg to Baltimore suddenly slowed down and switched off course to another track. He saw a body lying on the initial trackline the train was taking, and when the police went to check it out, they discovered that it was Carolyn Wasilewski, dead and laying face down.

Carolyn was found half-naked, but her body showed no signs of being sexually assaulted. She was covered in bruises and scratches. The name “Paul” was written in lipstick on her right thigh. Her skull and jaw had been battered, and one of her ring fingers was broken too. Police suspected that she was killed someplace else, and was then either tossed from an above bridge or moved to the track. The autopsy concluded that Carolyn died the night before, around 11 PM.

Near her house, and about 8 miles away from the railroad, police found bloodstains in a vacant lot. They also found Carolyn’s shoes and a few other personal items of hers.  Over 300 people were questioned by the authorities, including local drapes, but Carolyn’s murderer was never identified.

Police had two strong suspects, but both were eventually ruled out. The first was a man who sexually assaulted one of Carolyn’s friends. Carolyn testified against this man a week before her death. While he was brought in for questioning, police dismissed him, believing he had nothing to do with the crime.

The other suspect was a middle-aged man named Ralph Garret.  Garret lived in the area and was allegedly seen with Carolyn the night of the murder. Garret didn’t come home to his wife that night, and subsequently disappeared. His car was found abandoned 2 days later. out of town. The same day police started looking for him, a man stumbled upon Garret’s body near the same vacant lot where Carolyn’s bloodstains and shoes were found. He had committed suicide by hanging himself with a belt from “a brake wheel on top of a gondola car.” His suicide, however, was later deemed unrelated. According to Garret’s wife, he was depressed because his mother had died.

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The Frog Boys

/ Tristan / 6 Comments

frog2

On March 26, 1991, a group of five boys between the ages of 9 and 13 left their homes in Daegu, South Korea and walked to near-by Mount Waryong to look for frogs. U Cheol-won, Jo Ho-yeon, Kim Yeong-gyu, Park Chan-in, and Kim Jong-sik were all students at Seongseo Elementary School. The boys knew the area well and lived only a few miles away from the mountain.

The “Frog Boys”, as they would come to be known in the media, never came back. Their parents reported them missing, and while both townspeople and local police searched the area, not a single trace of the boys was found. As media attention escalated and the whole country became engrossed in the case, President Roh Tae-woo ordered 300,000 policemen to join in the search.

Over 8 million flyers were distributed all over the country, and a reward of 42 million won ($35,000) was promised to anybody who could locate the boys. Some of the Frog Boys’ parents became so determined to find their sons that they quit their jobs so they could devote all of their time to searching.

A picture from 1991 of the Frog Boys' parents and other supporters passing out flyers.

A picture from 1991 of the Frog Boys’ parents and other supporters passing out flyers.

Despite all the extra help, investigating the case proved to be difficult. Authorities received over 550 false leads, and at one point, a man called the police and lied that he abducted the Frog Boys. “I have kidnapped the boys for an exchange of ransom, and they’re dying of malnutrition,” he said in one of the calls.

The case went nowhere until September 26, 2002, when a man looking for acorns in Mount Waryong found scattered pieces of children’s shoes and clothing. He called the police, and after they searched the mountainside, found all five bodies of the Frog Boys in a shallow pit. At first, the police suspected that the boys had froze to death. It was cold and rainy the day they went missing, and the boys might have gotten lost. The fact that their bodies were so close together might have been because they tried huddling for warmth.

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Their parents, however, were skeptical. Their sons were found only 2 miles away from their village, so how could they have gotten lost? And why would they have taken off some of their clothes when the weather was so bad? Lastly, perhaps the most damaging point, Mount Waryong and the surrounding area had been searched and examined over 500 times the past decade. How could the bodies have possibly gone unnoticed for such a long period of time?

After the boys’ bodies were exhumed, police admitted that their hypothermia theory was incorrect. Three of the boys’ skulls had marks on them, suggesting they were beaten to death by a blunt object. Additionally, two of the skulls had traces of blood on them, and another had two bullet holes inside of it, possibly from a shotgun. The police were no longer dealing with a case of missing persons; the Frog Boys were murder victims.

The Frog Boys' parents at the burial for their sons.

The Frog Boys’ parents at the burial for their sons.

No further developments have taken place since the boys’ autopsy back in 2002. They were eventually buried on March 25, 2004, and their skulls were donated to Gyeongbuk University for medical research. In 2006, the case reached South Korea’s 15 year statute of limitations on murder, meaning the investigation was stopped and the murderer can’t be prosecuted for the crime anymore. Fortunately, South Korea removed the statute in July 2015, so perhaps there still is hope that the Frog Boys and their families will finally receive justice.

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The “Death to Pedophiles” Skull

/ Tristan / 2 Comments
Antibes, France.

Antibes, France.

On February 10, 2012, a professional diver looking for sea urchins off the resort of Antibes in southeastern France found something far grislier: a human skull. The skull, which was discovered on a seabed that was 10 meters (32 feet) deep into the water, had the words “Death to pedophiles” drawn on it, along with the scribbling of a shooting target.

The diver called the police, and several more dives in the area turned up a pair of arm bones, a leg bone, and part of a jawbone. Forensic tests determined that the bones had belonged to four different people, two men and two women. The skull was estimated to have been that of a 50-year-old man, and the rest of the bones, which were difficult to examine, might have come from people under the age of 30. It’s possible that the bones had been underwater for over a decade.

The upper arm bone discovered.

One of the discovered arm bones.

Authorities have launched an inquiry into cases of murder, kidnapping, imprisoning, and taking and receiving corpses. It’s believed that the bones belonged to the victims of a serial killer. Stephane Bourgoin, a criminologist and expert on serial killers, has suggested that the murderer lives in the area or knows it well.

Stephane Hirson.

Stephane Hirson.

Through further DNA tests, one of the arm bones was eventually identified as belonging to Stephane Hirson, a 17-year-old teenager from Paris who went missing shortly before his 18th birthday in February 1994. Hirson, who suffered from mental problems and had spent time in a psychiatric hospital, left his house without any money or personal belongings.

Some family members, however, were skeptical. One relative said in an interview with French radio that Hirson had no reason to be in southern France, and he had earlier told his mother that he was planning to go to Spain. Another DNA test was conducted, this time from the young man’s father, and the results determined that the bone wasn’t Hirson’s after all.

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