4 Crimes Resolved Through Stunning Coincidences

4 A Cop Hunting a Serial Killer Discovered His Own Daughter Gagged in the Van

Robert Black murdered four girls in the U.K. in the 1980s. We’d need at least a whole article just on him if we wanted to tell you about his entire career in detail. We could cover his weird sex crimes he was arrested for as a teen, his weird sex crimes he wasn’t arrested for as a teen, as well all the crimes in the 1970s that he merely might have committed. Then the confirmed murders began, a series that appeared to be linked, some with a suspect sighted but not identified until later. 

Let’s cut to 1990. Black now snatched a six-year-old girl off the street in a Scottish village named Stow. “Sorry,” he told the girl, according to an account she later told the police, and he pulled her into his van and stuffed her under one seat. It was the exact clichéd stranger-danger scenario that so many parents have nightmares about.

A neighbor caught sight of the abduction. David Herkes, a retired postman, wasn’t exactly equipped to shoot the van’s tires out and apprehend the kidnapper, but he did manage to note its license plate number. He delivered this information to the police, who now assembled and plotted how they were going to pursue this lead. Then, before they got around to pursuing anything, the van suddenly appeared and drove right up to them. 

Black had left town, but then he’d turned around and gone right through the village again, for reasons that remain unclear. He found himself riding right into the collected bobbies, who stopped him. One of the officers opened the van to pull the victim out. At first, only the girl’s feet were visible, sticking out of the sleeping bag where Black had bound her. Then the officer opened the bag, revealing that the girl was his own daughter. 

The names of the officer and the child have been kept private, due to laws about the privacy of crime victims. As for Black, police realized that he was the guy they’d been seeking for a decade before finding through means unconnected with the £12 million investigation. He was sentenced to life and died in prison in 2016. 

3 A Murderer Spared a Victim on Recognizing His Rescuer

In 1993, Australian man Ashley Lawler spotted a car wreck on the side of the road. He was driving home from work, and the crashed car had evidently been traveling in the opposite direction, toward the town of Port Arthur. Lawler stopped and helped the driver out of the wreck. We don’t know for sure if he saved the guy’s life in the process, but we imagine the crash victim had to feel grateful. 

Three years later, on April 28, 1996, Lawler was back again in Port Arthur as part of his job as a tour guide. He heard gunshots that day, and they didn’t scare him at first. Surely this was some sort of reenactment related to the site they were on, he figured. Port Arthur had been a penal colony in the 19th century, and while guides don’t usually fire blanks to inform and entertain visitors, that still seemed the most likely explanation. 

It wasn’t the correct explanation. As you’ve, of course, guessed, the shots came from a real shooter. His name was Martin Bryant, and his murder spree started with killing a man and woman who’d bought a B&B his father had wanted to buy. “In for a penny, out for a pound,” he must have said, because he then took an AR-15 to a café and shot up the whole place, while his video camera filmed the action. 

Bryant moved from the café to an adjoining gift shop, then to a parking lot, where he got into his car. He drove past Lawler, stopped and pointed his gun at him. Then he recognized him as the guy who’d saved him those years before, so he lowered the gun and drove on. 

That was great news for Lawler. It wasn’t, however, much consolation for the 35 people Bryant did kill, earning himself 35 life sentences. You ever heard the legend of Androcles and the lion, about a slave who helps a lion, who later recognizes him and refuses to kill him in the coliseum? This is like that, except with a bunch of additional deaths.

2 A Woman Got Kidnapped by a Serial Killer Right After Writing a Suicide Note

On November 3, 1984, Lisa McVey was happy because she had decided to shoot herself in the head. This isn’t unheard of with people who are suicidal; the decision to finally go through with it leads to a visible change in demeanor, often a positive one. The cause of McVey’s despair was her grandmother’s live-in boyfriend, and she’d written a suicide note explaining everything. Then she went to work at the donut shop, did a double shift and prepared to go home to her gun.

She ran into a different gun on the way. A guy knocked her off a bike, tied her up at gunpoint and chucked her in his car. The man — though McVey had no way yet of knowing — was Bobby Joe Long, a serial killer who had murdered eight women in Florida just that year. She would wind up spending the next 26 hours in his house. 

This period wasn’t great, as you can imagine, even for someone who considered herself inured to being molested thanks to her homelife for the past three years. But then afterward, most unexpectedly, Long drove her out and let her go. She’d earned his sympathy by telling him a story about being the sole caregiver to a sick father, and when Long let her out of the car, he said, “Tell your father he’s the reason why I didn’t kill you.”

Once McVey found her way back home, her grandmother didn’t believe her story. Of course she was lying — she’d left a suicide note, so what had clearly happened was she’d gone off somewhere to kill herself but then changed her mind. But when she went to the police, also telling them she thought the man might be the same guy responsible for a body that recently turned up, they did take her seriously. Her accounts of the guy’s movements led them to him. She also took this opportunity to get the boyfriend arrested, and the state moved her out of her grandmother’s and into a group home. 

Long pleaded guilty to eight murders, plus kidnapping and raping McVey. Florida chucked out that confession so they could try him their way, and it ended with him sentenced to death. McVey, now a cop, attended the 2019 execution. She wore a T-shirt with this message written on it: “Long Overdue.” 

1 A Man Rescued a Baby from a Dumpster Then Realized It Was His

Ian Turnbull, like so many of the unlikely protagonists we looked at today, was on his way home from work one day in 2010. He slid into his usual parking spot. Then a woman nearby pointed out something odd: The sounds of a baby crying were emanating from a nearby dumpster. To figure out if a baby really was in there, he had to climb inside the dumpster, dig through an upper layer of trash and open a bag. Inside, sure enough, was a newborn baby boy. 

A third neighbor joined in to help, and the gang called Calgary emergency services and got the baby to a hospital. In time, we imagine police would have investigated to find how the child had got there, and this investigation would surely have centered on people who lived close to that dumpster. If so, they would ultimately have found the culprit. But first, the case solved itself through other means. 

Just an hour after the baby’s arrival, a woman came to the hospital needing treatment. She had evidently very recently given birth, and she was unable to answer just where the baby was now. Police now concluded fairly easily that this was the mother of the mysterious boy. When they probed a little closer, though, they were surprised to find that the woman, Meredith Borowiec, had the same address as Ian Turnbull. She was his girlfriend, and he was the baby’s father. 

You might smell something fishy here and suspect that Turnbull was in on this baby-dumping scheme from the start but later changed his mind. Police concluded this wasn’t the case. In fact, early news reports were able to confirm Turnbull as a bystander who just stumbled on the dumpster (he stumbled on it because it was near his and Meredith’s home) but at first were unable to confirm that he was the father as he claimed, as that seemed like the most unlikely part of the story. 

According to Meredith, she didn’t know she was pregnant until she gave birth that day, and doctors who examined her believed her. This happens sometimes and has its own name: a cryptic pregnancy. Turnbull didn’t realize she was pregnant either, noticing only that she appeared to be ill. But a cryptic pregnancy is no excuse for murder, so police prepared to charge the woman. Despite what some claim, post-birth abortion isn’t a thing. That would be homicide. 

“Attempted homicide” was the indeed the planned charge. But when police interviewed her, Borowiec admitted some surprising details. This wasn’t the first time she had given birth to a surprise baby and abandoned it in a dumpster. She had done so in the past, on two separate occasions. 

Whatever extenuating circumstances might make you side with someone who was cryptically pregnant, dropping babies in dumpsters once a year for three consecutive years is harder to forgive. 

Prosecutors now pursued second-degree murder charges. In the end, they convicted her of double infanticide, which sounds even more extreme but is a lesser offense. It was an unusual conviction. Besides her admission, there was no evidence of those infanticides ever occurring. She had left no evidence at all that her victims ever existed. 

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