Mysteries and Histories

In the winter of 1994, figure skating stopped being just glitter and triple jumps when Tonya Harding’s story crashed into a hallway attack that shattered her rival’s knee and the sport’s reputation at the same time. Harding, tough, working‑class, and wildly talented, was suddenly at the center of a true‑crime‑level scandal after people in her orbit helped orchestrate the assault on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan, turning an Olympic dream into a tabloid nightmare and forever tying Tonya’s name to the question: how far did she really go, and how much was she willing to let others do in her name?

In December 1935, Hollywood comedian and café owner Thelma Todd left a glittering night at the Trocadero, was driven home to the Pacific Coast Highway, and then simply disappeared into the dark. Two days later she was found slumped behind the wheel of her car in a hilltop garage, dead from carbon monoxide, in the same party dress and heels she’d worn Saturday night, no clear injuries in the official report, no suicide note, and a timeline that immediately made police call it an accidental death while almost everyone else smelled something far more sinister.
Rumors of a staged scene, mob threats, jealous lovers, and a director who may have locked her out after a fight have kept her case alive for nearly a century, turning Thelma Todd’s silent, lonely death into one of Old Hollywood’s most enduring “did-someone-get-away-with-murder?” stories.

On a snowy February evening in 1957, 11‑year‑old Moira Anderson popped out from her Coatbridge home to run a quick errand, climbed onto a near‑empty bus in the blizzard and was never seen by her family again.
For decades, her disappearance was treated like a tragic mystery with no clear suspect, until witnesses, cold‑case detectives, and even the bus driver’s own daughter slowly pulled the same man into focus: Alexander Gartshore, a convicted child abuser who was driving that bus, seen dragging a girl like Moira, and who prosecutors now say they would charge with her abduction and murder if he were still alive.
Today, searches of graves, canals, and now even old mine shafts still chase Moira’s missing body, leaving her case “almost solved”, the likely killer all but named, the motive chillingly clear, yet the one small girl at the center of it all still lost somewhere beneath Scottish soil.

In the summer of 1974, a farm worker in rural Norfolk stumbled across a bundle in a field, a plastic sheet tied with rope, hiding the headless, bound body of a woman in nothing but a pink Marks & Spencer nightdress. With her head carefully removed and never found, no name, no missing‑person match, and only the faint clues that she was a young adult, likely a mother, and probably from central Europe, she became known only as the Norfolk headless body: a woman so thoroughly erased that, half a century later, police still don’t know who she was, let alone who decided she didn’t deserve an identity in death.

Along Oregon’s remote Highway 20, the road itself feels haunted: from the late 1970s into the early 1990s, a string of women and girls were abducted, raped, murdered, or simply erased along this lonely stretch of asphalt, while the same man’s name kept surfacing and somehow slipping away again. Only years later, after dogged reporters pieced together cold cases and families’ grief in the “Ghosts of Highway 20” investigation, did the picture sharpen around highway worker John Arthur Ackroyd, a predator who turned his job into a hunting ground and whose victims include a jogger taken from her morning run, a 13‑year‑old stepdaughter who vanished from home, and “lost women” the courts never fully accounted for.