The 11 Creepiest Unsolved Crimes No One Can Explain (Part 2)
We love horror stories because they actually make us feel safe -- you scare yourself with movies about ghosts specifically because nobody you know has ever been killed by one.
That's why around Halloween, we like to focus on the real shit. You know, the monsters that could in fact be outside your house right now. This is Part 2 of our list of unsolved crimes that are creepy as hell. Part 1 is here, if you missed it yesterday. Otherwise, let us gaze into the abyss together ...
Blair Adams Runs Across Two Countries Before Getting Murdered In The Most Bizarre Way Imaginable
Everything about this case reads like this guy was targeted by the monster from It Follows.
Blair Adams was an average 31-year-old Canadian construction worker who, on July 5, 1996, suddenly withdrew all the money in his bank account, emptied his safe deposit box, grabbed everything of any value from his home that he could fit in his pockets, and made a beeline for the U.S. border. Unfortunately for Adams, it turns out that U.S. Border Patrol tends to be suspicious of young men trying to enter America alone with giant suitcases full of money -- even from the Canadian side -- so he was turned away.
You can tell the American side made the sign due to the "WARNING!" instead of "SORRY!"
The next day, Adams quit his job and bought a plane ticket to Germany, immediately changed his mind and got a refund on the ticket, then showed up at a friend's house insisting that someone wanted to kill him. He begged his friend to smuggle him into America. When she refused, Adams got a rental car and tried again to cross the border. This time, he got through, and once he was in Seattle, he bought a plane ticket to Washington, D.C., then drove to Knoxville, TN.
This is less a sightseeing route and more like the path of a man who is desperately trying to lose something that he thinks is chasing him. Maybe he was paranoid? That's all we've really got so far, right?
Wait, It Gets Worse:
Once in Tennessee, witnesses reported that Adams entered a gas station and complained that his car wouldn't start. The attendant investigated and found that Adams had the wrong keys, even though he'd obviously managed to drive that car to the gas station somehow. He then hitchhiked to a hotel, paid for a room ... but never went to it. After handing over the money, he immediately left the hotel and never came back.
The most suspicious hotel behavior outside of getting charged seven bucks for a mini-fridge Toblerone.
Hours later, his dead body was found in a parking lot half a mile from the hotel. His pants had been removed (forcibly, it looked like) and the cause of death was found to be a single apocalyptic punch to the stomach, so powerful that it ruptured his internal fucking organs.
And that's it. That's all anyone knows. To this day, nobody can explain who Blair Adams thought was after him, or who challenged this Canadian man to a final, pantsless stomach-punching contest in goddamn Knoxville.
A Retired Police Officer Uncovers A 30-Year-Old Recording From His Son's Probable Killer
WARNING: This one involves a dead child, and is one of the worst things we've ever heard.
On January 12, 1984, seven-year-old Gary Grant Jr., the son of a New Jersey police detective, left his Atlantic City home and told his mother he had an "appointment" with someone. Given that seven-year-olds aren't exactly known for their business acumen, his mother thought that was strange, but figured the kid was being silly and let him out to play with his friends. He never came back, and two days later he was found bludgeoned to death with a metal pipe.
The investigation soon turned to Gary's 12-year-old friend Carl "Boo" Mason, who was reportedly the last person to have seen Gary alive. After an interrogation, Boo admitted to having killed Gary, and he was arrested for the crime. So far, this is all incredibly depressing, but hardly mysterious -- you've seen stuff like this on the news before. Even kids can kill.
The only problem was that Boo was mentally challenged -- enough that he would have admitted to killing JFK if that was the question they'd asked him. The admission was ruled inadmissible, Boo was released, and the cops were left without a lead ... until two years later, when someone wrote an seeming confession on the side of a patrol car. It read: "Gary Grant's dead. I am living. Another will die on January 12th if all goes right."
Note: Nothing about this scenario is "right."
Thankfully, it looks like all did not go right, because nobody was killed on January 12, as far as anyone is aware. Instead, another message was written on a sidewalk, saying, "Gary Grant Jr. lives. I still killed him. Son of a pig officer. Payback is a M.F."
It's good the child killer censored the swearing, in case children were reading.
They never tracked down whoever was leaving the messages, and the case went cold for 30 years. So was the graffiti a clue, or a hoax from some shithead trying to taunt the father of the victim? In either case, whoever left it almost certainly deserves to get whipped in the crotch with a length of rusty log chain.
Wait, It Gets Worse:
Nearly three decades later, in December 2015, the now-retired Gary Grant Sr. was going through a bunch of old evidence when he came across an audio recording from 1986. It was an anonymous caller admitting fucking responsibility for Gary's murder to a police dispatcher, which for some reason was never pursued as a lead. WARNING: THIS IS DISTURBING AS HELL.
The psychopath glibly asks if he can still collect the reward for information on Gary's murder if he did the murder himself. He ends by insisting it's not a prank call, and boasting that he'll never be caught. The guy isn't disguising his voice or anything. If investigators had had that audio, who knows? Maybe it sounds like somebody they'd already interviewed.
Of course, it could have been a prankster. This call took place on March 8, which would have been Gary's 10th birthday, and it occurred around the same time those cryptic messages appeared on the police car and the sidewalk. Unfortunately, due to the police's cunning investigative technique of "stash an incriminating recording in a box for three decades," we'll probably never know.
A Woman Disappears From A Disney Cruise Ship, And There Are Hints Of A Bizarre Cover-Up
Britisher Rebecca Coriam worked as a Youth Activities Coordinator aboard the Disney Cruise ship Wonder, which sounds like the happiest job in the world, unless you know absolutely anything about Disney or cruise ships. Coriam was seen on a security video having a distressing phone conversation on the morning of March 22, 2011 before leaving her quarters. And that's the last time anyone ever saw her.
Last House Of Mouse On The Left
She didn't show up for work that day, and couldn't be located after a ship-wide search. That means she went overboard, though a Coast Guard search of the surrounding waters didn't find a body.
Now, to understand why it's a pain in the ass to find the truth about anything that happens on a cruise ship, you have to understand the weird legal gray area in which these vessels float. The investigation into Coriam's disappearance was assigned to a single police officer in Nassau, Bahamas, because that's where the ship is registered for transparently nefarious purposes, which include avoiding certain taxes and safety regulations (it's hard to be the Happiest Place On Earth if you have to follow the fucking rules). In other words, this cop had jurisdiction purely due to the boat having put that address on some forms to exploit tax loopholes.
"Whistle While You Work The System"
Sure enough, the officer spent exactly one day on the ship before hauling ass back to the Bahamas and never following up on the disappearance ever again. It's not like his department had reason to prioritize a case involving some British lady on the good ship Mickey Mouse. The official story was that Coriam was near the railing when a rogue wave hit the ship, sending her toppling overboard. Note: There is no evidence or testimony that a rogue wave hit the boat that day. It sounds a lot like a boilerplate explanation for a cruise ship death you don't want to bother with.
Wait, It Gets Worse:
It really appears someone is trying to cover up what happened.
In November of 2011, journalist Jon Ronson boarded the Wonder to get to the bottom of this, and immediately found everyone acting suspicious as all hell. Some Disney crew members swore Coriam's disappearance never happened at all, because "that's the answer have to give." Other crew members recited the story of a visibly upset Rebecca going to a private crew-only pool on the deck (surrounded by a high steel wall) and intentionally climbing overboard.
Either she was really confused about where the Little Mermaid stuff was, or somebody got to her.
Disney even says they found one of her sandals by the pool, which seemed to confirm this theory ... except for the fact that one of Coriam's close friends insists that she never wore a pair of sandals like that in her entire time on the ship. If so, why in the hell would the cruise line lie about that? Another of her friends insists that the Disney higher-ups placed a bouquet of flowers by the crew pool after her disappearance without any explanation, which suggests that they either knew she fell overboard at that spot or wanted people to believe she did.
We're leaning toward "She didn't wear these," because who in their right mind would?
And here's the thing: The vast majority of the crew seemed to be in agreement that somewhere, someone within Disney knows exactly what happened, simply because virtually every square inch of the ship is monitored by security cameras, including the spot of Coriam's alleged suicide.
Members of the British Parliament have pushed for answers, suggesting that the truth is something Disney doesn't want out there -- such as that Coriam was sexually assaulted (she was last seen wearing oversized clothes that weren't her own) and then murdered. But Disney insists there is no video, and in fact won't even disclose the locations of their security cameras. No one has jurisdiction to force them to, because again, cruise ship.
Here she is, seen in the video that Disney insists doesn't exist.
Obviously, nobody is saying Disney is going around having people killed -- saying shit like that is the kind of thing that will get you killed by Disney. But if the young woman was the victim of something that would put Disney cruises in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, well, maybe they're happy to leave it a mystery. (Oh, and if you happen to know something, you can say so here.)
A Man Dies Of An Alleged Overdose, And His Parents Receive A Creepy Anonymous Letter
In 2011, a Chilliwack, British Columbia man named Corey Scherbey was found dead in his home. He was discovered on his knees in front of a sofa, his face pressed down into the cushion. There was a pool of black fluid surrounding him which looked like dried blood. In the absence of foul play, police ruled that Scherbey's likely cause of death was "acute combined cocaine and ethanol intoxication." In short, they figured he had simply balled too hard. They said there were no signs of trauma (the pool of blood was, they said, the natural result of the body purging its fluids after death).
Scherbey's parents found this unlikely, stating that Scherbey didn't do drugs, to the extent that he never so much as took an aspirin. Of course, that's what everyone's parents say, but Scherbey's parents also claim they found bloody footprints (which appeared to be a woman's) throughout the house, and a bloody handprint was found on his wallet, from which all the cash was missing. Also, a mysterious woman was supposedly seen at the apartment a few days earlier -- who has not been identified to this day.
Oh, and there was a cardboard box in the front hall scrawled with the words "Better be a funeral."
Clearly a victim of mullet profiling.
The police say all of that can be explained -- they say the bloody footprints weren't there when they arrived, and were probably the result of somebody being sloppy at the crime scene. And it's easy to imagine that these are simply parents in denial. There were no further leads indicating any crime, and the case remained cold for the next three years.
Wait, It Gets Worse:
In 2014, Scherbey's parents received an anonymous letter, which appears to have been written on the kind of old-timey typewriter that hasn't been used by anyone since the last World War. It read:
"Dear Mr. Mrs. Scherbey: Shakespeare said: 'Hell hath no fury than a woman scorned.' *Thats the kind of homicide it was, a scorned woman!* Those who KNOW it was, belong to too tight a group to say a word! I think your son Corey decided too late to 'back off' and it jeopardized his well-being -- his life! Sincerely, a reader of The CHWK Times."
Part of that sounds like a crank who heard about the case in the papers, and part of it sounds like they have inside info. It would have been easy to dismiss it as the former. But then a friend of Scherbey's named Tammy Bourdon contacted his parents, claiming that she knew that Scherbey had been murdered over a drug deal, but she couldn't say who did it, or else she would be next.
Well ... maybe she was also a crank, or maybe even the same one who wrote the letter? We could ask her, but a few of months later, she cut her finger and ... died of blood poisoning.
All right.
At this point, Scherbey's parents are going to look like this every second, in case anything else fucked up happens.
To this day, Scherbey's death is still officially an overdose. And hey, maybe it was! Maybe these other "tipsters" didn't know anything, but couldn't resist stirring the pot for the spiteful hell of it. Though, if true, that's pretty horrifying on its own.
A College Freshman Vanishes From His Room And Is Never Seen Again
On the night of December 10, 1999, Michael Negrete attended a party in his UCLA dorm, then went and played computer games with a friend until 4 a.m., at which point he went out into the hall to high-five his opponent (this was back in the golden days of LAN parties) before calmly reentering his room and apparently disappearing forever into a fold in the Universe.
The ultimate rage-quit.
By all accounts, Negrete was a well-adjusted kid with no history of depression or drug use. He had good grades and was attending UCLA on a music scholarship. Also, all of his belongings -- including his wallet, shoes, and keys -- were still in his room, completely undisturbed.
After Negrete's roommate reported his disappearance the next morning, a bloodhound traced Negrete's scent to a bus stop a few miles away, where the trail went suddenly cold. However, investigators were unable to answer why Negrete would have suddenly decided to catch a bus at four in the morning without saying a word to anyone, or why the driver would have let him board without the aforementioned wallet and shoes.
Wait, It Gets Worse:
The only other lead came in the form of an unidentified man in his mid-30s who was spotted in Negrete's dorm that night, wearing a "shiny gray jacket with a turquoise-colored design." Now, a man in his 30s creeping around a college dorm at 4 a.m. while dressed like a rollerblader is absolutely suspicious, but police were never able to track him down.
If not for this one bit of security footage, we'd have been asking Vladimir Putin what he was up to that night.
And ... that's it. It's been 17 years of absolutely nothing. If Negrete spontaneously ran away to start a new life, he did it without money -- he never tried to access his bank accounts, or contact any family or friends. If he sleepwalked into a fatal accident on the UCLA campus or spontaneously decided to commit suicide, surely a body would have turned up -- he couldn't have gotten far with no transportation and no shoes. That would seem to leave murder as the only remaining possibility.
But if Negrete had enemies or a secret life, absolutely no one had ever seen even the slightest hint of it. If he was abducted from the dorm by force, no one heard or saw anything, and no evidence of a struggle or a break-in was left behind. (Sure, it was in the wee hours of the morning, but this was a dorm full of college students -- somebody would have seen or heard something.)
Rarely has an expired domain name told such a depressing tale.
The kid played some games, said goodnight to his friend, headed to his dorm, then disappeared into thin air. Zero witnesses, then or after. No corpse, no credible tips, no physical evidence tossed down the trash chute, nobody saying they picked up a hitchhiker in his pajamas. Nothing. And it's not like he went missing in 19th-Century London, when records were sloppy, nobody owned cameras, and common folk could disappear by moving two blocks away. This guy vanished the same year Will Smith won a Grammy for "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It."
The only lesson here is that, even today, any one of us can spontaneously ... disappear.
Janel Comeau is still trying to solve the mystery of where her socks disappear to in the dryer. You can check how that's going on her blog or her Twitter feed. To hear Robin Warder analyze some more creepy unsolved mysteries, check out his true crime podcast, The Trail Went Cold. Tara Marie writes a lot. You can check out her fundraiser, and a bunch of others, on Twitter using #TransCrowdFund.
You know all those facts you've learned about psychology from movies and that one guy at the party who says, "actually ..." a lot? Please forget them. Chances are none of them are true. Take the Stanford Prison Experiment, the one famous psychology study people can name. It was complete bullshit. Funny story actually, it turns out that when you post flyers that say "Hey, do you wanna be a prison guard for the weekend? Free food and nightsticks," you might not get the most stable group of young men. So join Jack O'Brien, the Cracked staff and some special guests as they debunk Rorschach tests, the Mozart effect and middle child syndrome, so soon you can be that person at the party who says, "Actually ..." Get your tickets here!
For more reasons to never leave the house, check out The Creepiest Serial Killers (Who Still Remain At Large) and 5 Horrific Serial Killers (Who Are Free Right Now).
Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 7 Inadvertently Hilarious Horror Movie Villains, and other videos you won't see on the site!
Follow us on Facebook, and let us follow you home.
