Mysteries and Histories

On August 22, 2009, 37-year-old Paula Hounslea returned from a family meal in Liverpool and reportedly told her daughter she was going to visit a friend. She was never seen again. For nearly three years, her family had no confirmed answers about where she had gone.
Then, in May 2012, a dog walker discovered her remains in a disused fire pit beside the Liverpool Loopline in Fazakerley. They showed signs of burning but forensic evidence suggested they had been placed there only months earlier, leaving a disturbing gap between Paula’s disappearance and the discovery.bbc+1
Police launched a murder investigation, but no one has been prosecuted. Paula’s death remains unsolved, with unanswered questions about what happened to her and where her body had been before it was left beside the railway path.

On December 31, 1812, 29-year-old Theodosia Burr Alston boarded the schooner Patriot in Georgetown, South Carolina, to visit her father, former U.S. vice president Aaron Burr, in New York. Still grieving the recent death of her young son, she was heading toward a long-awaited reunion. The voyage should have taken less than a week but the ship never arrived.
Neither Theodosia nor anyone else aboard was heard from again. Over the years, stories emerged of pirates, deathbed confessions, and a mysterious portrait supposedly recovered from a wreck. None established what happened to her.
A violent winter storm off the Carolina coast remains the most plausible explanation for the ship’s loss. But without confirmed wreckage or remains, Theodosia’s fate is still unresolved, a disappearance that turned one family’s devastating loss into more than two centuries of speculation.

In April 2011, the Dupont de Ligonnès family disappeared from their home in Nantes, France. On April 21, police uncovered a horrifying secret beneath the terrace: the bodies of Agnès and her four children, Arthur, Thomas, Anne, and Benoît. All five had been shot, wrapped, and buried alongside the family’s two dogs.
One person was missing: husband and father Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès, who became the prime suspect. Investigators traced his journey south to Roquebrune-sur-Argens, where he was last seen on April 15, leaving a hotel car park on foot. His car stayed behind and his trail ended there.
Fifteen years later, Xavier remains missing. Did he die soon after disappearing, or escape to begin another life? Despite searches and reported sightings, neither possibility has been established, leaving five murders without a trial, and one of France’s most haunting mysteries without an ending.

In the early 1870s, young boys in Boston survived brutal attacks by another child: Jesse Pomeroy. At just 12, he was sent to reform school for torturing children but after his early release, the violence escalated into murder.
In 1874, 10-year-old Katie Curran disappeared, and four-year-old Horace Millen was found murdered. Pomeroy, then 14, was arrested for Millen’s death before workmen discovered Katie’s body hidden in the basement of his mother’s shop. He confessed to killing her, too.
Sentenced to death, Pomeroy instead received life imprisonment in solitary confinement after his sentence was commuted in 1876. His case horrified the country and sparked an uncomfortable question: how should society punish a child responsible for such calculated cruelty?

His name is on some of the most famous plays ever written, but could William Shakespeare have been a cover for someone else? Centuries after his death, gaps in his biography fuelled theories that the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon could not have created such extraordinary works.
Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, have all been proposed as the hidden author. Supporters point to supposed codes, biographical parallels, and aristocratic knowledge, but none has produced convincing evidence that another writer secretly created Shakespeare’s plays.
Contemporary references identify Shakespeare as a writer, and mainstream historians accept his authorship. This episode explores how a literary legacy became a conspiracy and why the search for a hidden genius can seem more compelling than the evidence in plain sight.