Archive for the ‘ Unexplained ’ Category

Disapperance of Lisanne Froon & Kris Kremers

Disappearance of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon, two Dutch girls that disappeared during a hike in Panama. 10 weeks after their disappearance bone fragments and a backpack were found. These pictures were retrieved from a camera that was in the backpack. What happened to the girls remains a mystery.

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Lisanne Froon, 22. Picture taken on april 1, the day of her disappearance. Cellphone data, found in their backpack, revealed that attempts to dial 911 were made some 2 hours after this photo was taken. There was no reception. The last attempt to dial 911 was 10 days after their disappearance.

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Ricky McCormick Murder

7938893.28Ricky McCormick’s remains were well on their way toward fertilizing the soil when investigators arrived to the scene in late June 1999. Filthy Lee blue jeans and a stained white T-shirt clung to his scrawny five-foot-six-inch frame. Although it had been just three days since he disappeared, the flesh on his outstretched hands was already rotted to the point that his fingertips, just below the top knuckles, had fallen off and lay next to him in the weeds.

How his corpse ended up facedown in this cornfield in rural St. Charles County — twenty miles from where he worked and lived in downtown St. Louis — was anyone’s guess. But the desolate sliver of land between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers has been a criminal dumping ground for years.

In 1995 authorities discovered the bullet-ridden body of an alleged prostitute in an abandoned house along the same stretch of U.S. Route 67. Two years after McCormick’s death, state road crews mowing grass some 300 yards away from where he lay found the nude bodies of two more women.

The notes seem to display elements of secret languages and simplified phonetic spellings. For example, “MLSE” could be code for “miles.”

The notes seem to display elements of secret languages and simplified phonetic spellings. For example, “MLSE” could be code for “miles.”

Advanced decomposition made an autopsy of McCormick difficult. Following a thorough examination of the 72 pounds of bones and flesh that survived exposure to the elements, pathologists with the St. Charles County Medical Examiner’s Office ultimately ruled McCormick’s cause of death “undetermined.” Yet police suspected foul play.

Homicide detectives searched the 41-year-old victim’s pockets for clues and interviewed his relatives, girlfriend and others who knew him. Soon leads began to run dry, and a stack of other cases piled up on investigators’ desks. Before long McCormick appeared to join the ranks of countless other poor, indigent men whose short lives ended under suspicious circumstances only to be forgotten.

Twelve years passed, and then everything changed.

In March 2011, FBI officials made a rare and remarkable revelation, seemingly out of the blue. Dan Olson, chief of the bureau’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU) in Quantico, Virginia, disclosed for the first time the existence of two pages of handwritten encrypted notes found stuffed in a pocket of McCormick’s jeans. Unable to decipher the tangle of letters and numbers, the FBI released copies to the public with a plea for assistance to hardcore puzzle solvers and wannabe sleuths alike.

It turns out McCormick’s riddle, allegedly written by a man who could hardly write his own name, has stumped the world’s foremost code breakers. They remain so baffled, in fact, that McCormick’s notes now rank third on the CRRU’s list of top unsolved cases, behind only an unbroken cipher authored by the self-proclaimed Zodiac killer in 1969 and a secret threat letter written to an undisclosed public agency about 25 years ago.

FBI code breakers typically unlock the meanings of ciphers they receive in a matter of hours. McCormick’s notes have eluded Dan Olson for more than a decade. Although he has since been promoted to lead the bureau’s cryptanalysis unit, Olson was a forensic analyst when the McCormick codes first made their way east to Quantico in late 2001. He’s been puzzling over them ever since.

Olson projects a clinical approach to his job: disciplined, methodical, emotionally detached. When the McCormick codes originally hit his desk, Olson attacked them as he always does, counting characters and looking for patterns. He attempted to break them down manually with graph paper and a pencil. He dissected the strings of letters and numbers on whiteboards amid the acrid whiff of dry-erase markers. He employed computers with state-of-the-art software to perform statistical analyses. Olson worked on the codes for two solid weeks.

He got nowhere.

He brought in other analysts to take a look and brainstorm ideas and consulted experts for clues. He compared the letters and numbers in the notes to every street address in St. Louis and vetted them against maps from across the country, but no hits rose to a level beyond coincidence.

“It doesn’t happen often that we have an unsolved cipher of this length and significance,” Olson says. “The characters are not random. There are many E’s, for example, that could be used as a spacer. There are many characteristics that suggest it could be solved, many patterns. The problem is we don’t know why it is not solvable.”

Cracking a code takes four steps. First one must determine the language used, in this case, English. Then the system used — a cipher in which letters are transposed or substituted for something else, for example, or a code in which a letter such as “R” represents a person or place, or perhaps even a secret language such as a version of pig Latin. After

that one must reconstruct the key that explains how the code maker changed the letters of the message, such as by shifting every character three letters to the right in the alphabet. Finally, one can apply the key and transcribe the intended text.

“We cannot get past step two,” Olson says of the McCormick case.

Some have suggested the notes are meaningless, the random scribblings of a man who by all accounts was functionally illiterate and demonstrated a low IQ. Olson is quick to argue otherwise. He is convinced the codes could contain leads about where McCormick was or with whom he met in the last hours before his corpse was abandoned to rot along with his secrets.

“This means something,” Olson says. “We look at a lot of things that are gibberish, arbitrary strikes on a keyboard. This is not that case.”

The McCormick notes eventually moved to the back burner. But a few years ago, with some new staff and capabilities in the FBI laboratory, Olson decided it was time to revisit the case and bring in some fresh eyes. Approximately fifteen of the twenty analysts on staff applied their experience and techniques to the codes. Still nothing worked, putting McCormick’s handiwork in rare company. The FBI examines hundreds of suspected codes each year. After weeding out those that are nonsense from the codes the bureau categorizes as solvable, only about 1 percent go unbroken, Olson says.

In September 2009, Olson’s frustrated team looked outside for help. They presented the McCormick puzzle to a room of about 25 amateur code breakers gathered in Niagara Falls, Ontario, for the annual convention of the American Cryptogram Association. The challenge generated interest, but association members have been unable to make any breakthroughs.

The FBI has been stumped for a decade but insists the writings have meaning.

The FBI has been stumped for a decade but insists the writings have meaning.

Despite investing hundreds of hours to decipher the mystery over nearly a decade, the FBI’s elite CRRU — the same unit that cracked the codes of Nazi spies during World War II — remained foiled by the apparent craftsmanship of a high school dropout.

Olson’s rare, and some would say humbling, decision to appeal to the masses last year for help garnered immediate attention. Local newspapers and TV stations in Missouri and Illinois ran with the update. So did news organizations from as far away as New Zealand, Germany and Ghana.

The deluge that followed prompted the FBI to establish a special Web page just to handle the more than 7,000 public comments and theories that have poured in so far. Respondents have suggested the encrypted notes could mask information about everything from vehicle identification numbers, gambling books and drug-dealing transactions to addresses and directions, mental-health episodes or medications. The list goes on and on. Sifting through them all has prompted seven or eight conversations about potential leads between Olson’s team and local investigators, he says. But no arrests or significant developments in the case have emerged. The secrets buried in the codes remain as mysterious as the events that precipitated McCormick’s death.

Ricky McCormick always stood out as different from his peers. His mother, Frankie Sparks, describes him as “retarded.” His cousin Charles McCormick, who shared a brotherly relationship with Ricky for most of his life, says Ricky would often talk “like he was in another world” and suspects Ricky might have suffered from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

“Ricky went to see a psychiatrist, and he said Ricky had a brick wall in his mind,” remembers Gloria McCormick, an aunt better known as “Cookie” in whom Ricky often confided. “He said Ricky refused to break that wall. He didn’t like the life of living poor and had an active imagination.”

It’s unclear whether McCormick ever received formal treatment for mental illness, but family members recall Ricky’s penchant for concocting tall tales and his displays of unusual behavior. As a boy he spent so much time at recess standing off by himself that his mother would receive calls from school administrators asking if anything was wrong.

Teachers shuffled McCormick along from grade to grade, but he could hardly read or write when he dropped out of St. Louis’ former Martin Luther King High School on North Kingshighway.

McCormick subsisted on occasional odd jobs — floor mopper, dishwasher, busboy, service-station attendant — and disability checks he collected due to chronic heart problems. He preferred the graveyard shift and developed a reputation as a night owl, heading out the door at dusk and dragging himself home at dawn.

“I called him a vampire,” Gloria McCormick says. “He slept all day, and then at night he rises.”

As a teenager and later as an adult, he frequently hitched a ride or caught a bus to distance himself from the street toughs who dealt drugs and picked fights outside his now-bulldozed home near the present-day intersection of Lindell Boulevard and North Sarah Street.

Eventually Ricky found trouble himself. In November 1992, St. Louis police arrested the 34-year-old McCormick for having fathered two children with a girl younger than fourteen years old. McCormick had been sleeping with the girl since she was eleven, according to court files, which protected the girl’s identity. McCormick’s mother and aunt knew the girl simply by her nickname, Pretty Baby.

While awaiting trial on the first-degree sexual-abuse charge, McCormick’s public defender noted she had reasonable cause to believe McCormick was “suffering from some mental disease or defect” and requested that the judge order a mental-health exam. Dr. Michael Armour, a local psychologist, evaluated McCormick at the former St. Louis State Hospital. Following Armour’s report and a hearing, however, the court certified McCormick was fit for trial. Six weeks later, on September 1, 1993, McCormick pleaded guilty to the crime. State inmate 503506 would spend thirteen months behind bars in the Farmington Correctional Center before being sent home a year early on conditional release.

McCormick’s relationship with Pretty Baby reflected an obvious lapse of good judgment. It wouldn’t be his last.

McCormick may have been regarded as something of a simpleton who, despite some street smarts and his criminal record, was generally naïve to the world. The same cannot be said for the men who ran the Amoco gas station at 1401 Chouteau Avenue south of downtown St. Louis where he worked.

Fawaz M. Hamdan, the original owner of the business, killed his neighbor with a butcher knife during a front-yard argument in May 1994. He later died in Missouri’s Potosi Correctional Center while serving a life sentence for second-degree murder.

Juma Hamdallah, a Palestinian immigrant who until 2002 used the name David Radigan, took over as president of the business. Juma employed his brother Baha “Bob” Hamdallah. Despite their familial ties, the two have had a rocky relationship. In August 1999, less than two months after McCormick’s death, police from Maryland Heights investigated an incident in which Juma allegedly shot Baha. Baha Hamdallah survived and filed no charges, but, according to police records, detectives looking into the shooting gathered information allegedly linking Baha “to black gang members in St. Louis City and narcotics use” and noted “Baha is reported to be violent and in possession of several weapons which include handguns and knives.”

Indeed, among the Hamdallah brothers (another, Jameil Hamdallah, is a registered sex offender), Baha appears to be the most volatile. Police reports and witness statements spanning several years illustrate repeated episodes of violence that seemed to accompany him wherever he went.

Shortly after moving to St. Louis in 1997 from Cleveland, Ohio, then 22-year-old Baha Hamdallah was cruising the streets of St. Louis in a blue Mazda Protegé when a police detective saw him pull up alongside a man named Tarrence Clark, lean out his car window and fire a shot at him with a .38-caliber revolver, according to the police report of the incident and witness statements. Clark escaped unharmed. Baha was arrested but never prosecuted.

Nine months later, on the evening of March 4, 1998, Baha Hamdallah was visiting one of his older brothers, Bahjat Hamdallah, at his job at the Family Market, a small corner grocery store in the Tower Grove East neighborhood. They got into an argument, and Baha allegedly grabbed a gun and opened fire on Bahjat from across the street. A bullet tore into the left side of Bahjat’s abdomen and knocked him to the ground. Baha jumped into his car and sped off.

The eyewitness reports, including that of the manager who knew Baha from frequent visits to the store, were consistent in the police report. But a bloodied Bahjat, either out of fear or a remaining shred of fraternal loyalty, told police he had never seen his assailant before and described him as a goateed Hispanic man rather than his five-foot-ten, 225-pound Middle Eastern brother.

Six days later Baha Hamdallah turned himself in and was arrested on a felony charge of first-degree assault, but Bahjat told police he did not wish to prosecute. State court files show no record of the case.

Later the same month, while working at the family’s Amoco station, Baha Hamdallah was arrested again, this time on a felony charge of second-degree assault, for allegedly beating a man named Elroe Carr with a rusty hammer. Baha allegedly threatened to kill Carr, described by family and acquaintances as a sometimes-homeless drug addict, if he didn’t get off the property. Baha told police, “I just figured I’d take care of this myself,” according to the incident report.

On August 7, 1998, two weeks before Carr’s case against Baha Hamdallah was slated to go to court, Carr was gunned down just blocks from the Amoco station on a residential street in the neighboring housing project. The pending assault charges against Baha died that night with Carr.

Carr’s murder remains unsolved, and police made no arrests. But confidential informants told police Carr was killed “at the behest of Baha Hamdallah,” according to St. Louis police reports obtained through a public-records request.

There would be more violence to come.

Minutes before sunrise on June 15, 1999, about two weeks before his death, Ricky McCormick walked up to the counter at the Greyhound bus terminal downtown and purchased a one-way ticket to Orlando. It would turn out to be the last of at least two brief trips to Florida he made that year.

It’s not clear whom McCormick met during his stay in Room 280 at the Econo Lodge in Orlando. But phone records show he or his girlfriend, Sandra Jones, made a flurry of calls to several people in central Florida a couple of weeks ahead of his arrival. Jones and McCormick exchanged a similar barrage of short phone calls during the two days McCormick spent in Orlando, and he made at least one call to the St. Louis gas station where he worked.

Jones would later tell police she suspected McCormick went to Florida to pick up marijuana. According to a sheriff’s department investigative report, Jones’ explanation went like this:

McCormick would accept offers to pick up and deliver packages for money. He made trips to Florida before and on several occasions brought marijuana into the apartment he shared with Jones in the Clinton-Peabody housing project south of downtown. The drugs would usually be sealed in zip-lock bags rolled together into bundles the size of baseballs. McCormick told Jones he was holding the stashes of weed for Baha Hamdallah, the police report states.

McCormick never liked to talk about his excursions to Orlando, but he seemed different when he got back that last time, Jones told police. He seemed scared.

Indeed, McCormick’s already unsettled lifestyle seemed to become more erratic after he came back, as if he sensed trouble around the corner but didn’t know where to turn. McCormick used much of his time during his last days to seek out medical care or, perhaps more accurately, a safe place to stay.

Around three o’clock the afternoon of June 22, 1999, McCormick walked alone into Barnes-Jewish Hospital’s emergency room complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath. This was nothing new. McCormick had a history of ER visits and had suffered from asthma and chest pains since childhood. He told his doctors he didn’t abuse drugs or alcohol, a statement friends and family back up. It didn’t help, however, that he smoked at least a pack of cigarettes a day since he was about ten years old and drank coffee by the gallon. By his own estimate, he told his doctors he downed more than twenty caffeinated beverages a day.

Doctors ruled out a heart attack but admitted McCormick for observation and kept him there for two days. Ricky left the hospital on June 24 with orders to return for follow-up visits in the coming week. He would never make it to those appointments.

McCormick took a bus to his aunt Gloria’s apartment after leaving Barnes-Jewish and visited with her for about an hour. Her home had always been a sanctuary for him, and he maintained a closer relationship with Gloria than with his own mother, who lived just around the corner.

“Everybody needs someone to talk to now and then,” Gloria says. “Ricky would come visit and talk with me.”

But he revealed little this time, chatting just a bit before getting up to leave. It was late afternoon, and Ricky waved off offers to drive him wherever he needed to go. Gloria’s last image of Ricky is him walking down the street.

Around 5 p.m. the next day, June 25, McCormick entered the emergency room at Forest Park Hospital, less than two miles from Barnes-Jewish. This time he complained that he was having trouble breathing following an afternoon of mowing grass. Doctors diagnosed his wheezing as another asthma flare-up. He was not admitted, however, and was officially released at 5:50 p.m. It’s not clear when he actually left the hospital. Gloria says she heard McCormick spent that night in the waiting room before leaving the next morning.

Jones told police that she talked with McCormick on the phone at about 11:30 a.m. on June 26. He told her he was out of the hospital and was on his way to the Amoco to get a bite to eat. At least one gas-station employee told police he last saw McCormick there the next day, on June 27.

McCormick left the gas station with at most hours left to live; medical examiners determined he was definitely dead the same day.

Looking back, Gloria McCormick suspects Ricky’s hospital visits were attempts to find a hideout where he could lay low. Sitting at an open window in her same apartment, Gloria’s voice softens between tugs on her Salem 100’s cigarettes. “Maybe he knew he got into something that put his life on the line,” she says. “He knew he could have stayed here. But maybe he didn’t want to put my life on the line.”

When McCormick’s corpse turned up, his girlfriend Jones’ thoughts turned to Baha “Bob” Hamdallah. After McCormick returned from his trip south, Jones said she suspected Ricky might have done something wrong in Orlando. If anyone was going to hurt McCormick, she told investigators, it would probably be Bob Hamdallah.

On December 23, 1999, detective Jana Walters of the St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department received a call from Sgt. Ed Kuehner of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide division. He had information to share about Ricky McCormick’s death and wanted to arrange an inter-agency meeting.

Nine investigators gathered on the fourth floor of St. Louis’ police headquarters six days later. In addition to Walters and her partner, detective Michael Yarbrough, Kuehner’s gathering included members of St. Louis’ homicide and narcotics divisions, investigators with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and a special agent from the FBI.

Walters and Yarbrough learned St. Louis police were investigating a man named Gregory Lamar Knox, a major drug dealer who operated in and around the housing complex where McCormick had lived, as a suspect in several homicides, including “at least two murder-for-hire schemes.” According to police records, a confidential informant also told police that Knox was responsible for the murder of a black man who worked at the gas station on Chouteau Avenue and whose body was dumped near West Alton. St. Louis police had also linked the Hamdallahs with alleged “criminal activity and the possible association with Gregory Knox.”

The St. Charles detectives came away from the meeting wanting to know more about the role Knox and the Hamdallahs may have played in McCormick’s death. Within weeks they began conducting stakeouts of the Hamdallahs’ gas station and the homes of several of its owners and employees.

No arrests ever materialized. Yarbrough says that despite ongoing suspicions, detectives never could substantiate claims from informants suggesting a connection between the Hamdallahs and Knox or prove either was responsible for McCormick’s death.

Still, both Knox and Baha Hamdallah found their way to prison, at least for a time.

Knox was arrested on July 25, 2000, and pleaded guilty in January 2001 to charges of possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine and carrying a firearm during and in relation to a drug-trafficking crime. A March 2001 HUD report to Congress noted Knox “was a suspect in at least four homicides that occurred in 1998 and 1999 in the LaSalle Park Homes and Clinton-Peabody public housing developments (in St. Louis). He was also the number one supplier of narcotics to LaSalle Park Homes.” Knox is currently serving his sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, and is scheduled to be released in November 2013.

On October 13, 2000, Baha Hamdallah was managing another store, Charlie’s Food Market in Madison, Illinois, when he got into an argument with a customer named Robert Steptoe. Different versions of events were later presented in court, but ultimately a jury convicted Hamdallah of first-degree murder after he shot Steptoe in the face with a 9-mm Glock pistol outside the store. In September 2002 a Madison County judge sentenced Hamdallah to 38 years in prison for killing Steptoe.

Nearly four years later, however, in May 2006, an Illinois appellate court ruled Hamdallah’s lawyer erred by not calling a gunshot-residue expert to testify in person in the shooting case. The appellate court granted a retrial. In the second go-round, the jury bought Hamdallah’s claims of self-defense and his version of events in which the gun went off while he and Steptoe were struggling for control of the pistol. On May 15, 2008, Hamdallah walked out of court a free man.

Attempts to contact Baha and Juma Hamdallah for this story were unsuccessful. Brother Bahjat Hamdallah says Juma now lives in the Philippines and that Baha has married and relocated back to the Cleveland area in his attempt to start over following his Illinois murder trial.

Gregory Knox, responding by e-mail from prison to questions about McCormick and allegations he was involved in McCormick’s murder, wrote: “At this moment this is all new information to me, and I have no information that could help your case.”

With little left to go on, investigators now believe that the codes found on Ricky McCormick may offer the best hope to explain how his corpse ended up in that isolated cornfield so many years ago. The FBI’s Olson is convinced an answer to the codes is out there, though it will not appear out of thin air.

“Can it be solved? Yes, I am absolutely confident,” Olson says. “But you can’t just will it.”

Today the field in West Alton offers no hint of its murderous history. No marker or makeshift memorial stands in the place where McCormick’s body was found. The cycle of seasons erased long ago what little impression he left behind.

A few miles south, no headstone identifies McCormick’s final resting place at Laurel Hill Memorial Gardens. If not for an entry in the cemetery’s log book, one would never know his bones are buried beneath the grass designated as Space #2 in lot 11D. Here and there other graves are decorated with red silk flowers and plastic green wreaths, but not McCormick’s. There is no sign anyone has ever visited his anonymous plot.

Back in St. Louis, McCormick’s family members say they have never heard from police about the Hamdallahs, Knox or other details of the investigation into Ricky’s death. They never heard about the encrypted notes found in his pocket until the local evening news broadcast a report on the codes.

“They told us the only thing in his pockets was the emergency-room ticket,” McCormick’s mother, Frankie Sparks, says. “Now, twelve years later, they come back with this chicken-scratch shit.”

Contradicting the FBI’s statements to the media, family members say they never knew of Ricky to write in code. They say they only told investigators he sometimes jotted down nonsense he called writing, and they seriously question McCormick’s capacity to craft the notes found in his pockets.

“The only thing he could write was his name,” Sparks says. “He didn’t write in no code.” Charles McCormick recalls Ricky “couldn’t spell anything, just scribble.”

Don Olson stands by his assessment, however.

“I have every confidence that Ricky wrote the notes,” Olson says. “They are done in more of a format of something written to oneself than something written to someone else.” As an example, he points to circles drawn around some segments of code that suggest a to-do list where items are marked as tasks are completed.

Elonka Dunin, an expert amateur cryptographer who has consulted novelist Dan Brown of The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code fame, agrees the McCormick notes appear to be personal. They might be a message from one person to another but do not look as if intended, as with some other famous ciphers, to be challenges to a broader audience, she says. Dunin, a computer-game developer who happens to live a short distance from where McCormick’s body was found, has spent tens of hours during the past year analyzing his notes. Like Olson, she suspected McCormick might have authored them for his own private consumption. Upon learning more about McCormick’s illiteracy and personal background, however, she has second thoughts. “I don’t think McCormick wrote these notes,” she says. “Perhaps he was a courier.”

Olson insists the only reason he decided to make the notes public was to see if somebody would recognize the code or provide new information that could help decipher it.

“Sometimes tips generate a seed that generates an ultimate break,” Olson says. “The codes were released in the hope that someone would see this and suggest ideas. We can become tunnel-visioned. We know a little bit about this case, and sometimes that puts us at a disadvantage.”

At St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department headquarters, detective Yarbrough peers through eyeglasses over a salt-and-pepper mustache. A career cop since 1979, he has seen his share of murders, frauds and other crimes. Few have generated as much exasperation as the McCormick case.

Unincorporated St. Charles County has only seen about five unsolved murders since the 1960s, Yarbrough says. The McCormick investigation remains an unfinished job, an unmet challenge and a professional frustration. He remains unsure whether he will ever know McCormick’s true fate and be able put the mystery surrounding Ricky’s death to rest.

“I still have the same feeling that things don’t add up,” Yarbrough says. “It’s kind of like Humpty Dumpty. All the pieces are there, but how do you put them back together?”

Bear Brook Murders

19013292On November 10, 1985, a hunter came across a tipped-over 55-gallon drum and trash near Bear Brook State Park, Allenstown_23yearold01not far from a convenience store that burned down in the 80s. Inside the drum, he found what would become one of New Hampshire’s most haunting and bizarre crimes to date. The remains of an adult woman (23-33 years old) and a little girl (8-10 years old) were found wrapped in plastic inside the drum. The New Hampshire State Police looked at missing people from the 70s and 80s. They were unable to identify the bodies, but ruled out some of New Hampshire’s most famous missing people, including Tammy Belanger and Page Jennings.

In 1986, the New Hampshire State Police got their first major tip when they looked into the Allenstown_5yearold01disappearance of Grace Reapp and her five year old daughter Gracie from the state of Vermont. It is believed Grace and Gracie were killed by Michael Reapp, the husband and father. They were ruled out through New Hampshire dental records. Michael Reapp committed suicide while police were trying to arrest him for an armed carjacking in 1997. The remains of Grace and Gracie Reapp were never found.

Over the years New Hampshire State Police have received hundreds of leads in this case. Investigators distributed composite drawings of the victims throughout the Northeast and Quebec. Several people in the town of Allenstown said the woman resembled someone who had left town with Allenstown_4yearold01several children a few years earlier before. The woman was tracked down in two weeks and was found alive, living in Arizona with the children.

New Hampshire State Police got another lead about a mother and daughter who had vanished from a Maine Indian reservation. The descriptions and time of their disappearance seemed a perfect match, but several days later, they found the woman and child in another town in Maine. Investigators checked every elementary school in the state of New Hampshire and medical records of missing persons from Cape Cod to California with no success. One of the major roadblocks in this case is the fact the most law enforcement agencies do not provide or keep adequateAllenstown_1yearold01 information on missing persons cases.

In 2000, the case took another turn when the case was assigned to another New Hampshire state trooper. The officer returned to the area where the bodies were found, and 700 yards away found another 55-gallon drum. Inside that drum were the remains of two little girls that DNA linked to the adult woman. The new remains were that of a white female child (1-3 years old) and another white female child (4-8 years old). It was determined that this child (the 4-8 year old female) was not related to any of the other victims.

In 2010, the New Hampshire State Police and New Hampshire Attorney General’s office created the state’s first cold case unit and assigned this case to them. The Cold Case Unit has been using a new technique that links isotopes found in drinking water to different regions of the country. They are trying to use hairs from the unidentified female to find where they may have came from.
To date, no one has determined the identities of these individuals.

In 2000, New Hampshire State Police looked at serial killer John Edward Robinson in this case — his M.O. matched, but he was ruled out.

There have been theories that this crime was the work of a serial killer or an organized crime member. Some believe the killer was someone local or who knew the area well because it was not close to any main highways. One possible theory is that the victims could have been killed by a boyfriend or husband.

Little Lord Fauntleroy

Little_Lord_Fauntleroy_sketchLittle Lord Fauntleroy is the informal nickname given to an unidentified American boy who was discovered murdered in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on March 8, 1921. The boy was interred on March 17 that year. There was speculation that the child may have been Homer Lemay, who went missing at the same time the body was disposed of. This, however, has never been confirmed.

On March 8,1921, the remains of a boy aged five to seven were found floating in a pond near the O’Laughlin Stone Company in Waukesha, Waukesha County, Wisconsin. He had been struck with a blunt instrument and was then disposed in the local body of water. Despite being dressed in clothing that may have come from a high-class family, no one came forward after the discovery to claim the body. In efforts toward his identification, his body was displayed at a local funeral home. A reward of one thousand dollars was also posted, but did not generate any information. His clothes consisted of a gray sweater, Munsing underwear, black stockings, a blouse and leather shoes. He had blond hair and brown eyes with a cherubic face and a missing tooth from his jaw. The boy could have been in the water for several months.

A man, an employee for the O’Laughlin company, claimed that he had been approached by a couple five weeks before the body was found. The woman, who wore a red sweater, requested to know if the man had seen a young boy. She was reportedly upset and the man accompanying her was seen watching the area where the child was located. They later left in a Ford vehicle and have never been located since that time. A possible scenario for the case is that Little Lord Fauntleroy may have been abducted from a wealthy family in another location and disposed somewhere else to prevent his identification. After the investigation halted, money was raised by a local woman, Minnie Conrad, for the child to be buried at the Prairie Home cemetery, in Waukesha. She was later buried in the same cemetery in 1940 after she died at the age of seventy-three.

It was reported that there were sightings of a woman wearing a heavy veil who would occasionally place flowers on the boy’s grave and may have possibly known who he was when he was alive.
Homer_LemayIn 1949, a medical examiner from Milwaukee, Wisconsin suggested after learning that investigators felt that there may have been a connection between the unidentified boy and Homer Lemay, a six-year-old who disappeared around the same time the child died. Lemay was said, by his father, Edmond, to have died in a vehicle accident during a trip in South America when he was being cared for by family friends (described as the “Nortons”), but there was no existing record of his death. Edmond Lemay stated that he learned of his son’s death after receiving information from a South American newspaper that detailed the accident. He also was accused of falsifying his wife’s signature while she was missing, but was later found to not be guilty. Detectives were unable to find any information about such an event or even the existence of the two Nortons.

Highway of Tears

Many of the women who have gone missing along Highway 16 belong to indigenous communities.

Many of the women who have gone missing along Highway 16 belong to indigenous communities.

OFFICIALLY it is called Highway 16. But to many, the notorious stretch of road where dozens of women have simply disappeared or turned up dead, has come to be known as the Highway of Tears.

A section of Highway 16, which runs between Prince George and Prince Rupert in British Columbia, Canada.

A section of Highway 16, which runs between Prince George and Prince Rupert in British Columbia, Canada.

No one knows exactly how many have vanished along the 800km road through British Columbia in Canada, though some say the number could be as high as 40.

Signs along the highway warn of a serial killer on the loose, cautioning girls not to hitchhike, though the killer theory has not been proved.

The lack of answers only adds to the mystery, and for local people, the growing sense of alarm.

Many of the missing belong to remote indigenous communities, with little or no transport or phone coverage, and who are forced to hitchhike to get around.

Most disappeared on a remote stretch linking the cities of Prince George and Prince Rupert.

“A lot of women are forced to hitchhike along the highway because there is no other option,’’ anti-violence campaigner Wendy Kellas, who works on the Highway of Tears project to raise awareness.

She said one official estimate listed 18 women as missing or murdered in the past 30 years, however indigenous communities claim that number is far higher.

The high number of cases have even sparked claims of at least one serial killer targeting vulnerable women along the remote route.

The first killing was recorded back in 1969 when the body of Gloria Moody was found. The 26-year-old had gone out to a bar but never returned home.

Some of the suspected victims and where they were found.

Some of the suspected victims and where they were found.

Six years later, the body of Monica Igna, 15, was found in a gravel pit, and in 1988 Alberta Williams turned up dead just one month after being reported missing.

Then in 1994, the bodies of three indigenous teenagers were found dumped by the roadside, sparking angry calls for police to do more to protect vulnerable young girls and women.

More recently, the body of pregnant student Loretta Saunders from the eastern Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, was found by police in March last year.

Eerily, the 26-year-old had reportedly been writing her thesis on the missing and murdered women when she disappeared.

Hitchhikers have been warned about the dangers of travelling along the road.

Hitchhikers have been warned about the dangers of travelling along the road.

Her body was found off Route 2 of the Trans-Canada Highway in New Brunswick — more than 720 kms from her hometown of Halifax.

However, Ms Saunders’ roommates Blake Leggette and Victoria Henneberry were charged with 1st-degree murder.

As families continue to search and authorities try to gain a more accurate picture of the missing, human rights groups have accused police of not doing enough to help vulnerable women.

In its February 2013 report Those Who Take Us Away: Abusive Policing and Failures in Protection of indigenous Women and Girls in Northern British Columbia, Canada, HRW said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in northern British Columbia had failed to protect indigenous women and girls from violence.

Human Rights Watch, which conducted research along Highway 97 and along Highway 16, said women and girls had reported abusive treatment at the hands of police including excessive use of force, as well as physical and sexual assault.

The road stretches for hundreds of kilometers with lack of phone coverage in many spots.

The road stretches for hundreds of kilometers with lack of phone coverage in many spots.

It also called for a national inquiry into the murders, as well as the disappearance of indigenous women and girls.

“The Canadian government should establish a national commission of inquiry into the murders and disappearances of indigenous women and girls, including the impact of police mistreatment on their vulnerability to violence in communities along Highway 16, which has come to be called northern British Columbia’s “Highway of Tears,” it said it a statement.

Human Rights Watch added women who called the police for help were often blamed for the abuse, shamed over alcohol or substance use, and often found themselves at risk of arrest for actions taken in self defense.

Dozens of women have vanished along the infamous stretch of road.

Dozens of women have vanished along the infamous stretch of road.

Others told the human rights group that some family members and who made calls to police to report missing women or girls said the police failed to investigate disappearances quickly enough.

Just this week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights presents presented a report on missing and murdered indigenous women.

The report analysed the context in which indigenous women have been murdered and gone missing over the past several years and the response by the Canadian State.

Many indigenous communities are located near Highway 16.

Many indigenous communities are located near Highway 16.

“The numbers of missing and murdered indigenous women are particularly concerning considering that indigenous people represent a small percentage of the total population of Canada,”

“The disappearances and murders of indigenous women in Canada are part of a broader pattern of violence and discrimination against indigenous women in the country.”

Human rights groups say large numbers of indigenous women have disappeared from communities along or near the highway.

Human rights groups say large numbers of indigenous women have disappeared from communities along or near the highway.