Mysteries and Histories

In October 1976, a farmer harvesting corn near Otterbein, Indiana, found a small cardboard box about 15 yards from the road. Inside was the body of an older woman who had been shot in the back of the head. For almost 50 years, she was known only as the “Box Lady of Benton County.”
In 2026, genetic genealogy finally identified her as Jane Hart, a 69-year-old woman who had been living in Chicago around the time of her death. Her identity was restored but the person who killed her, and the reason she ended up in a rural Indiana cornfield, remain unknown.

In 2002, a quiet Ohio man named Joseph Newton Chandler III died by suicide in his Eastlake apartment. He left behind $82,000, but no family, no clear past, and a name that turned out to belong to an eight-year-old boy killed in a Texas car crash in 1945.
For years, authorities had no idea who the adult “Chandler” really was. He had acquired the dead child’s identity in 1978 and lived under it for decades, carefully cutting himself off from people and paperwork.
In 2018, genetic genealogy finally identified him as Robert Ivan Nichols: a World War II veteran and Purple Heart recipient from Indiana who had once had a wife and three children, then vanished from their lives in the 1960s.
The name was solved, but the real mystery remains: why did Nichols abandon his family, steal a dead child’s identity, and spend the rest of his life hiding? No definitive answer has ever emerged.

In October 2006, a man harvesting dogwood plants found a young woman’s remains in a marshy field near the Darlington Nuclear Plant in Bowmanville, Ontario. Investigators estimated she was 18 to 25 years old and that she may have died years before she was discovered.
She was found with a ring marked “Burns,” but no identification. Police believe she was likely murdered; modern DNA analysis indicates African and Southeast Asian ancestry, possibly with Caribbean roots.
Nearly two decades later, Bowmanville Jane Doe still has no name, and no one has been charged in her death.

In 1887, reporter Nellie Bly faked mental illness to be committed to New York City’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. For ten days, she witnessed cold baths, rotten food, beatings, neglect, and women held there despite showing no sign of mental illness.
Her exposé, Ten Days in a Mad-House, shocked the public and helped secure increased funding and reforms for the institution. More broadly, it changed journalism: Bly proved that going undercover could expose abuses that officials preferred to keep hidden.
Two years later, she became a global celebrity by travelling around the world alone in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, beating Jules Verne’s fictional 80-day journey. But it was her time inside the asylum that made Nellie Bly a pioneer of investigative reporting.

On the morning of February 10, 1990, two armed men walked into Las Cruces Bowl in New Mexico, forced seven people into an office, stole less than $5,000 from the safe, and shot every victim before setting the room on fire.
Steven Teran, 26; his two-year-old daughter, Valerie; six-year-old Paula Holguin; and 13-year-old Amy Houser were killed in the attack. Three others survived: bowling-alley manager Stephanie Senac, her 12-year-old daughter Melissa Repass, and cook Ida Holguin. Senac died in 1999 from complications connected to the wounds she suffered, bringing the death toll linked to the massacre to five.
More than 35 years later, no one has been charged. The two gunmen have never been identified, and the Las Cruces Police Department still considers the case open, one of New Mexico’s most devastating unsolved crimes.