Post by Graveyardbride on Oct 4, 2018 0:25:29 GMT -5
Circleville's 'pumpkin' water tower
Five of the Strangest Unsolved Death/Murder Mysteries
Since the beginning of recorded time – and likely before – people have been interested in murder and unsolved mysteries. Today, even after police and private investigators shelve cold cases, real-life murder mysteries continue online, meticulously pored over by murder and mystery buffs throughout the world. Such cases are particularly popular when some enthusiast uploads photo “evidence” or eyewitness accounts. Evidence that a jury might take as sufficient cause to convict, or acquit, a killer doesn’t quite satisfy online researchers and conspiracy theorists continue to embrace creepy, unexplained details, often falling deeper into a rabbit hole of independent investigation.
The Circleville Letters. Circleville, Ohio, is known for two things: pumpkins and poison pen letters. In 1976, Mary Gillespie, a school bus driver, began receiving anonymous letters about what she thought was a discreet affair with Gordon Massie, the school superintendent. Later, her husband Ron also received a letter. On August 19, after talking with what was presumably an anonymous caller, he grabbed his pistol, told his children he was going to confront the individual and drove into a tree. He was killed instantly. The toxicology report revealed Ron Gillespie’s blood alcohol level was 1.5 times the legal limit, though people who knew him insisted the man was a teetotaler. There were also rumors the sheriff himself had said there was more to the crash than met the eye, an allegation he later denied. In the meantime, the writer of the poison pen letters embarked on an earnest campaign for a more thorough investigation of Gillespie’s death.
Years later, the poison pen letters resumed, however, by this time, Mary and the superintendent were married. One day Mary Massie noticed a derogatory sign and discovered a box with a string tied to a nearby post. She removed the box and when she opened it, found a crudely-designed booby trap intended to cause a pistol to fire. It didn’t work and police noticed someone had attempted to file off the gun’s serial number, but this hadn’t worked either and the firearm was traced to Paul Freshour, Ron Gillespie’s brother-in-law. Freshour insisted the gun had been missing a long time and denied writing the letters. And though he had an alibi for the day the booby trap was set, he was nonetheless charged, convicted and served 10 years in prison. But the poison pen letters didn’t cease: While in prison, Freshour received a mysterious letter that read: “Now when are you going to believe you aren’t going to get out of there? I told you two years ago. When we set ‘em up, they stay set up. Don’t you listen at all?”
Freshour was paroled in May 1994 and six months later, the TV show Unsolved Mysteries decided the Circleville incident was worthy of a segment. A few days later, the network got a letter of its own: “Forget Circleville, Ohio ...,” the phantom writer warned, “if you come to Ohio, you el sickos will pay. The Circleville Writer.”
Kathy Hobbs: Premonitions of Death. The kidnapping and murder of 16-year-old Kathy Hobbs in July 1987 is so odd it was also featured on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. Following her death, the teen’s parents and friends disclosed that all her life, Hobbs had experienced “premonitions” that foreshadowed her death at age 16. During her teen years, she developed agoraphobia and refused to leave the house, but after April 20, 1987 (her 16th birthday), came and went, she believed the curse was broken – or so her friends and family claimed. However, just three months later, Kathy was walking to her Las Vegas home after purchasing a paperback romance novel when someone abducted and killed her. The medical examiner determined she had died from blunt force trauma to the head
In 1989, Michael Lee Lockhart of Toledo, Ohio, was charged with the murder of a man in Beaumont, Texas, and convicted. He was finally executed on December 6, 1997, but never confessed to killing Kathy Hobbs. Some aren’t convinced he killed the girl, but the $64-thousand-dollar question is: How was Kathy Hobbs able to predict such a seemingly random act of violence?
Death on the Railroad Tracks. On August 23, 1987, a train conductor called in an incident report saying he had just run over what appeared to be the bodies of two young men tied to the tracks in Alexander, Arkansas. The state medical examiner later said he believed the teenagers, Don Henry, 16, and Kevin Ives, 17, had smoked too much cannabis and fallen asleep on the tracks. Because this explanation seemed unlikely to some, rumors swirled that the boys had stumbled upon a drug drop and were killed as a result.
In January 2018, WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) superstar Billy Jack Haynes went public claiming he witnessed the murders of the two teens. He said he had been hired by a local politician – presumably Bill and/or Hillary Clinton – to act as security for the drop and saw the killings. Nothing ever came of Haynes’ assertion and online readers have seemingly forgotten the bizarre YouTube video. However, subsequent autopsies of the two young men revealed Henry had a stab wound and Ives had been struck in the head “with the butt of his own gun.”
The Boy in the Chimney. On Thursday, May 8, 2008, 18-year-old Joshua Maddux of Woodland Park, Colorado, went for a walk. This wasn’t unusual because he was something of a free spirit and loved nature. But on this day, he never came home. Seven years later, Chuck Murphy, who was demolishing an old cabin (above) approximately a mile from where Maddux had lived, discovered something shocking: As he and his men dismantling the chimney, they came upon a mummified human body. When the corpse was identified as that of Josh Maddux, family members were stunned.
The coroner returned a finding of accidental death, indicating Maddux likely died of hypothermia during “a voluntary act in order to gain access,” but Murphy disagreed. According to Murphy, the chimney had been constructed 20 years earlier and fitted with a steel rebar, a large, thick wire mesh hung from steel hooks to prevent animals and debris from lodging in the chimney. “There’s no way that guy crawled inside that chimney with that steel webbing. He didn’t come down the chimney.” Also, the body was in a fetal position, with the legs above the head, and disjointed from his torso. In order to have gotten into such a position, Maddux would have had to have entered the chimney head first and why would he have done such a thing? Additionally, the body was wearing a thin thermal shirt and the remainder of his clothing was discovered inside the cabin.
Of interest, Maddux was last seen in the company of Andrew Richard “Andy” Newman, who was arrested in Texas in 2009 for stabbing a disabled man to death in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Newman also claimed to have killed a woman in Taos after which he stuffed her body into a barrel. Did he stuff the body of Josh Maddux into the chimney?
The Woman in the Water Tank. In February 2013, guests at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles complained of weird-tasting drinking water. When maintenance workers checked the tanks, they discovered the body of Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Chinese woman, floating in one of them. It appeared someone had pushed or thrown her into the tank and locked her inside. The unexplained death went viral when detectives released security footage showing Lam standing in the elevator acting strangely on the night she disappeared. Stranger still, guests at the hotel were affected by a mysterious local outbreak of tuberculosis around the same time. The test for early diagnosis of TB in children is called the LAM-ELISA (Lipoarabinomannan-Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay).
Sources: Emily Gaudette, Inverse, September 18, 2018; The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture; KTHV; Find-a-Grave; Historic Mysteries, October 5, 2016; Diana Brown, HowStuffWorks, June 27, 2017; “Joshua Maddux: The Boy in the Chimney,” The Dark Histories Podcast; and The Houston Herald, June 29, 2009.
