Cases From Unsolved Mysteries That Have Since Been Solved

Unsolved Mysteries is a lot more than just a throwback true crime show. It's also been helping solve cold cases for almost 50 years. Georgia Tann could be described as a reverse Robin Hood, with a couple of crucial differences. What she was stealing were babies, and she wasn't exactly giving them to anyone — unless you count selling babies for $750 a pop, so more robbing cribs than Robin Hood. Hello, pretty girl. Would you like to ride in my new car with me?" Then again, she was running her black market baby brokerage from the 1920s to the 1940s, so that was around $18,000 in today's money. Tann was doing a brisk business, too. It's estimated she took more than 5,000 babies from their parents, and her operation was sophisticated. Her day job was serving as the county director of the Tennessee Children's Home Society, which sounded trustworthy during those less cynical times. But Tann didn't leave thanks to chance. She paid off family court judge Camille Kelly, guaranteeing that parents who fought back were bound to lose in court. "'Georgia Tann' could not have carried it on without her, and Camille Kelly could not have lived in the style she lived unless she had outside income." Tann got away with it for decades and died in the nick of time in 1950, just three days before investigators finally closed in. Unsolved Mysteries featured the story in December 1989, and the show received more than 600 calls from people who thought they might have been trafficked by Tann. At least 50 of those cases were solved in the first eight months after the program aired, including that of Lynn Hines, who, according to The Tennessean, was sold to a doctor at the age of 5. "'This is like Christmas, New Year's, everything rolled up into one." Probably the most famous black market baby was wrestling superstar Ric Flair. He said he's made his peace with that part of his history and claims to have no interest in seeking out his biological parents. For a brief moment in the early 1990s, the Gits seemed poised to be the next punk band from Seattle to break into the big time. Their frontwoman, 27-year-old Mia Zapata, was a well-loved member of the local music scene. Zapata's tragic murder on July 7, 1993, deeply shook Seattle. Unsolved Mysteries wasn't the only program to run an episode on Zapata. Dead of Night and 48 Hours also looked into the case, as did a documentary on the Gits. Police investigated the possibility of an attack by a local cab driver and reports of a scream heard near Zapata's last known location. It came up empty-handed, and the murder remained unsolved for nearly a decade. In 2002, DNA samples pulled from Zapata's body were matched to Jesus Mezquia, who was then living in Florida. He had an extensive criminal record since his arrival in the U.S. from Cuba, including assault. At the time of Zapata's murder, Mezquia was living in Seattle with a girlfriend, who wasn't home the night of the killing. Mezquia was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to 36 years in prison. He wouldn't live to see life outside prison again. He died in 2021 at the age of 66. In the fall of 1953 in Jamestown, New York, a white woman fell in love with a Black man. The couple, Eleanor Platt and John Elias, lived together secretly and planned to get married. When Platt became pregnant, the couple decided to tell her family. Platt told the Buffalo News, I thought once they knew I was pregnant that it would be accepted and we could get married. I had warned her before that if she went home that there would be problems. Elias was right. Eleanor's father drove Elias off with a shotgun and a racist slur. She was put into a home because that's what they did with girls that made mistakes. They accused him of rape. Elias was sentenced to nine months in jail. Meanwhile, Platt's parents forced her to give the baby, Rosemarie, up for adoption. The couple was separated until years later when Elias, now married, wondered what happened to Platt and set out to find her. After their reunion, they decided to appear on Unsolved Mysteries in the hope that someone might know the whereabouts of their daughter. Rosemarie, I want you to know that I do love you, and your father loves you, and that's why we're working together to find you. Rosemarie, who is now Sally Riley, was 37 years old and living in Pennsylvania when a friend of her adopted mother saw the story on television. The family was soon reunited. Not exactly a happy ending, but thanks to Unsolved Mysteries, they now have a future. When a guy we'll call Gabby — because that's what the show called him — moved away from Thermopolis, Wyoming, he left some stuff with his friend Newell Sessions, including a trunk with a lock on it. Now, if someone you know left a trunk with a lock on it and didn't come back for six years, what would you do? Sessions opened the trunk and found a human skeleton inside. But instead of calling the police, Sessions figured he should call Gabby — you know, to give him time to come up with a cover story or get disappeared. Gabby was apparently ready. Wasn't me. He told Sessions he'd bought the trunk at a yard sale and had no idea what was in it, which would mean he had way better self-control than anyone ever. I said, I think if the best thing we could do with it would be to take it out here and dig a hole and give it a proper burial. Sessions' wife had more sense and made him call the police, who figured out the guy in the trunk had been murdered. That was as far as they got. Meanwhile, Gabby died by suicide. The case appeared on Unsolved Mysteries in February 1993. In 2017, a woman named Shelley Statler contacted investigators and told them she believed the remains belonged to her grandfather, Joseph Mulvaney, who disappeared in 1963. A DNA sample confirmed her suspicions. The murder remains unsolved, but Statler believes Mulvaney was murdered by his wife, who died in 2009. Gabby, it turns out, was John Morris, Mulvaney's stepson, so it was most likely a family affair. In 1996, Richard and Ruth Wendorf, a middle-aged couple in Florida, were bludgeoned to pulp with a metal bar. The case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in February 1997, but the police already pretty much knew who did it. According to The Independent, police had been investigating a local vampire cult, starting with a break-in at a dog shelter in which two animals were killed and a third one had to be euthanized because it was injured so badly. Add to that the fact that the Wendorf's daughter, Heather, was involved with 16-year-old Rod Farrell, who once had to pay $30 in video store late fees because he kept a copy of Interview with a Vampire for two weeks. Farrell was part of a vampire cult that drank human blood. I'm flesh and blood, but not human. I haven't been human for 200 years. Heather, Farrell, and three other self-proclaimed vampires were arrested and charged with murder. Heather was later cleared, but Farrell pleaded guilty, insisting he'd only done it because Heather told him she hated her parents and wanted them dead. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was downgraded to life in prison because he was only 16. Technically, though, he told everyone he was 500. 16-year-old Carrie Lynn Nixon disappeared from her neighborhood in 1987. Her case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in May 1989, but the story failed to produce any good leads. A few years later, though, Nixon's mother was watching a New Kids on the Block video when she spotted a girl in the audience who she thought looked just like her daughter. Nixon had been a fan, so it seemed possible. I couldn't believe how much that this girl looked like our daughter. So we just kept rewinding it and going over and over and over. Nixon's story made it into a second episode of Unsolved Mysteries, which featured the video clip. This inspired New Kids on the Block to get involved. They asked the anonymous girl to come forward, but when she did, it wasn't Nixon. The story had a tragic ending in 1994 when her killer confessed to the crime. Bank robber Robert Jones made a deal with prosecutors — information about Nixon's death in exchange for a lighter sentence for his wife, who drove a getaway car during a robbery. As it turned out, Jones had abducted, raped, and murdered Nixon while she was on her way home. He buried her in a shallow grave just a few miles from her house. In 1994, Unsolved Mysteries featured the story of John and Nancy Bosco, who were found murdered in their home in Ferndale, Montana. When the police failed to come up with much in the way of leads, John Bosco's mother called a psychic, a guy named Danion Brinkley, who, much like the Flash, was struck by lightning and came out of it with superpowers. Brinkley said the killer knew the Boscos and was familiar with their home, which would be a solid guess. Then he said something considerably more specific. In the very early part of December, this little kid will be caught, and he's in a college somewhere out west. And sure enough, in December 1993, Joseph Shadow Clark told fellow students at George Fox College in Oregon that he'd killed a bunch of people. Clark was arrested, and the case was solved. Unsolved Mysteries ran the story in October 1994 — yes, after the killer was caught. But the real mystery, as far as the show was concerned, was how the psychic was so spot-on. It didn't help solve the murder, but it's still pretty spooky. In this horrible story, Joan Rogers and her teenage daughters were found dead in Tampa Bay, bound, gagged, and weighed down on concrete blocks. The three were on a long road trip from their family farm in Ohio. Along the way, they stopped at the Jacksonville Zoo, SeaWorld, Epcot, and MGM Studios. Or they ran into a guy who offered to take them on a boat ride around the bay, during which he raped and murdered all three of them. The only real evidence police found was a note with directions to a local hotel, which wasn't in the handwriting of any of the victims. The story was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in November 1991, but none of the tips that came in helped at all. After several more years with no leads, police decided to try something that had never been done before — they put the handwritten note up on a billboard. Now, that just seems like a desperate stab in the dark, until you hear what happened next. Two women had always thought that a local contractor resembled the police composite sketch, and when they saw the handwriting, they dug up contracts featuring his handwriting. It was a match. Police arrested Oba Chandler two months later. He was executed for the murders in 2011. Losing a child is the ultimate tragedy, and it's even worse if the police accuse you of their murder. In 1989, three-month-old Ryan Stallings was found to have high levels of ethylene glycol in his bloodstream. That's a chemical found in antifreeze. A child who's four months old doesn't have the capability of ingesting anything, therefore it had to be purposefully ingested. Doctors suspected foul play, and the baby was placed in protective custody. Once there, he seemed fine until his mother, Patricia Stallings, was allowed to visit him. He died the next day. Stallings, who was pregnant, was arrested and charged with murder. When her second son, David, was born, he was immediately placed in protective custody. But then he got sick, too. Similarly high levels of ethylene glycol were found in his blood, but Stallings hadn't been anywhere near him when he fell ill. The doctors eventually diagnosed David with a rare genetic disorder called methylmalonic acidemia, or MMA, which mimics ethylene glycol poisoning. For some reason, Patricia Stallings' lawyer didn't mention this at her murder trial, so she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In May 1991, Stallings' story appeared on Unsolved Mysteries, where it was seen by William S. Sly, a biochemist and molecular biologist. Sly tested Ryan's blood and confirmed that he died from MMA. Patricia was eventually cleared, and David was returned to his parents. Daphne Boyden was 17 years old in 1996, when she was murdered in her Vallejo, California, home. The killer set her body on fire and escaped with her 25-day-old son, Laison Williams. Witnesses reported seeing two girls leave the scene of the crime, but after that, the police had no leads. The case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in but the police didn't solve the crime until 2002. An anonymous tip came in not long after the Unsolved Mysteries segment was rebroadcast. The killer was Latasha Brown, who, with the help of a cousin, shot Boyden and set the fire to cover her tracks. She originally fled to Texas, where she obtained a fake birth certificate, and then returned to Vallejo and raised a child just two miles from the scene of the crime. Prosecutors said Brown had had a previous relationship with the baby's father, and jealousy had compelled her to commit the murder and steal the baby. Brown was sentenced to 37 years in prison. 37-year-old Susan Bachman suffered from anxiety and depression. It was serious enough that she agreed to voluntarily commit herself to a psychiatric center in Clarion, Pennsylvania, in July 2014. In the car, she kept saying, I'm afraid, I'm afraid." On her way there, she suddenly jumped out of her parents' vehicle at roughly 50 miles per hour. Witnesses saw her roll as she hit the ground, then get up and flee into the woods. Bachman's parents called the police, and a search and rescue team scoured the area with dogs and a helicopter. They found Bachman's cell phone and wallet in an abandoned barn. But there was no trace of Bachman. The case was featured on the Unsolved Mysteries website in September 2014. Tips from viewers didn't solve this mystery, just time and police work. In March 2015, Bachman's purse was found in the woods where she was last seen. In the previous September, her clothing had been located in the same general area. Police then searched the area with cadaver dogs and found her skull and several vertebrae. The coroner ruled her death accidental, likely the result of injuries sustained when she jumped out of the car. On August 30, 1993, Craig Williamson went missing from his motel room in Colorado Springs. Williamson lived in Wisconsin with his second wife, Christine Reinhardt, and ran a fish farm selling tilapia to restaurants and other buyers. Williamson was in Colorado Springs on business when he vanished. His motel bed hadn't been slept in. Most of his things were still in the room, and his car was found in Mexico. Reinhardt, who described Williamson as a devoted and loving husband, suspected that her husband was suffering from amnesia. He'd had a concussion that July. If it were hit on the head, perhaps by muggers, he might have forgotten his life and headed to his former home in the Pacific Northwest. When I saw him on TV, you know, I recognized him. And I said, that man was on the train that I was on. Reinhardt insisted that this sighting was evidence, but police basically rolled their eyes and didn't follow up. Reinhardt didn't give up, though. She continued to pursue her theory, and her quest made it onto Unsolved Mysteries. The story aired on May 25, 1994, and who turned out to be watching but the man himself, who was living in Key West, Florida. Williamson contacted Reinhardt and his first wife after seeing the program. The story he told matched Reinhardt's theory, and he claimed not to remember their life together. Police continued to have doubts about the whole amnesia thing, but with no clear crime, they closed the books on the investigation. On July 4, 2017, 9-year-old Kayla Unbehon vanished from her hometown of Wheaton, Illinois. Her parents, Ryan Iskurka and Heather Unbehon, were separated, and Iskurka had full custody of their daughter. When Iskurka went to pick up Kayla from her mother's house after a Fourth of July parade, they weren't there. Police began a search, but the case was still open in November 2022, when Unsolved Mysteries featured it in an episode. An employee at a shopping mall in North Carolina who saw the episode thought she recognized Kayla and Heather in her shop and called authorities while they were still shopping. She was right, and Heather was arrested on fugitive charges. She later traveled to Kane County, Illinois, to surrender. Kayla, who was 15 by that time, was returned to her father in May 2023. Heather pleaded guilty to child abduction and was sentenced to two years of probation. Sometimes, it only looks like the husband was the killer. A Season 6 Unsolved Mysteries episode featured the story of Colorado resident Barbara Bobby Joe Oberholzer, who failed to return home in January 1982 after going out for drinks with friends. The next morning, a farmer who lived 30 miles away found Bobby Joe's driver's license on his property. An extensive search led to the discovery of the woman's body in the snow, a cord tied around one wrist. Nearby, they found house keys and an orange sock that belonged to someone else. On the same day the body was found, a cocktail waitress named Annette Schnee was reported missing. It would be another six months before her corpse turned up, wearing the other orange sock. Schnee's wallet also contained an intriguing bit of evidence — Jeff Oberholzer's business card. Apparently, he picked up Schnee while hitchhiking around town sometime earlier, which was obviously a pretty damning connection. But Oberholzer had actually passed a polygraph test two months after his wife's death, and even had a witness to corroborate his whereabouts, although it would take until 1990 for the man to come forward to clear Oberholzer's name. In 2021, nearly 40 years after the two women were murdered, DNA evidence tied 70-year-old Alan Lee Phillips to the killings. He was subsequently convicted of two counts of first-degree murder. In a sickening twist, investigators discovered that Phillips had been rescued by police from a snowstorm in January 1982, on the very same night he committed the murders. A 2022 episode of Unsolved Mysteries featured the story of 7-year-old Aziz Khan, who was abducted from Atlanta in November 2017 by his mother, Rabia Khalid. At the time, she was separated from her husband, Dr. Abdul Khan. The couple shared custody during the initial 2014 separation, during which Khalid took on a new job and relocated to Atlanta from the couple's New Orleans home. Khan remained a doting parent, frequently traveling to Atlanta to see his son, but Khalid leveled accusations against her estranged husband, claims that were ultimately disproven. And eventually, it seemed like Khan was going to be granted full custody of Aziz. Sometime around Thanksgiving of 2017, Khalid and her boyfriend, Elliot Blake Bourgeois, took off from Atlanta with Aziz in tow. Rabia Khalid's case went cold until February 2025, when deputies in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, responding to a potential burglary call, found a parked car sitting outside a vacant house with two children inside. The officers questioned a man and woman who emerged from the home and eventually found that the woman was Khalid, and the older child in the car was her son, Aziz. It had taken seven years to find Aziz Khan, living more than 1,000 miles away from home. But after the couple's arrest, the boy, now 14 years old, was finally returned to his father. A 1988 Unsolved Mysteries segment detailed the discovery of a collection of letters written home by soldiers fighting overseas during World War II. The letters were found in 1986 by an exterminator named Mike Mingus while he was working in the attic of a house in Raleigh, North Carolina. He saw only a few letters at first, but soon located a duffel bag stuffed with what turned out to be 235 letters in all. The letters were written by 92 soldiers on the SS Caleb Strong, sailing from Virginia on its way to Algeria in May 1944. The woman who owned the house where the letters were found had a nephew who'd been a member of the crew. He'd gathered the letters and promised the soldiers he'd make sure they got sent, but then he forgot to mail them and stashed the duffel in his aunt's attic. Mingus took custody of the letters, and with help from the Postal Service, he made sure they were finally delivered to their intended recipients. All but three reached their final destinations. An incredible feat, considering they'd been written to more than 150 people living at 117 addresses in 34 states over 40 years earlier. Instead of trying to locate the addressees, Postal Service media relations officer Meg Harris located the soldiers to determine where each letter belonged. The process took 30 months, if you don't include the 40-plus years it took to locate the letters. Northern California was on edge in November 1991 after three Loma security guards were shot during an armored car warehouse robbery. Two victims died at the scene while the other made it to the hospital, but died there. Police had no suspects, but they did have plenty of evidence to work from, in the form of duffel bags, gloves, masks, and other tools presumed to belong to the killers. They also had the murder weapon, a .357 Magnum, that had been left at the scene. When the story became an unsolved mystery segment in 1992, the investigation was still underway. In March 1993, police arrested Thomas Young on firearms charges, though they had intel from an informant that he was involved with the murders as well. His confession included the names of three other suspects. Despite initially pleading guilty, Young took back his confession, which led to the charges against McClain and Muhammad being dropped. Thanks to advances in DNA testing, saliva on one of the stocking masks found by police placed Muhammad at the scene. All but McClain were found guilty of murder and attempted robbery, and served time for the crimes. After the trauma of 9-11, the U.S. was subjected to even more incidents of terrorism. In October 2001, a number of letters laced with anthrax, an infectious disease spread by bacteria, were received by unsuspecting victims who opened them without realizing what they'd unleashed. The letters originated in Trenton, New Jersey, but they made their way as far as Boca Raton, Florida, where a photo editor for the city's Sun newspaper became the killer's first victim. Two others were infected soon after, one in Trenton and the other in D.C., but both managed to survive. In the weeks that followed, 16 more people received anthrax-dusted letters, leading to four more deaths. This time, the perpetrator got letters all the way to the offices of U.S. Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Investigators believed that the letters had been sent by a single source and determined the anthrax had originated at one of two U.S. military bases. A reward of $2.5 million was posted for information leading to an arrest. The story appeared on Unsolved Mysteries in August 2001, but it took until August 2008 for prosecutors to name Bruce Edward Ivins as the anthrax killer. Not only did the infectious disease scientist have access to the anthrax used, people around him noticed him behaving suspiciously. Despite being identified, Ivins died by suicide before he could be arrested. In 1991, two morning DJs at L.A. radio station K-Rock began encouraging listeners to call in with stories of horrible crimes. You know, like cleaning a toilet with a roommate's toothbrush or blowing up an enemy's mailbox. It was all like that, until one morning, a guy called in with a rambling confession about a murder. Now, no matter how not-serious your radio show might be, if someone calls you to confess a serious crime, you call the police. And that's what they did. The confession found its way to Unsolved Mysteries, which aired it twice. Police were overwhelmed with tips. It took weeks to work through the hundreds of leads, some of which came from the grieving families of murdered loved ones. After a while, though, the radio station got suspicious and conducted an internal investigation. And surprise! The whole thing had been a publicity stunt. The hosts were fined $12,170 for the 149 hours police spent trying to solve the non-existent crime. As for Unsolved Mysteries? Well, mystery solved.