#unexplained death

Frances Glessner Lee (American, 1878-1962)

Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

Forensic science pioneer Frances Glessner Lee was influential in developing the science of forensics in the United States. To this end, she created the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, 20 true crime scene dioramas recreated in minute detail at dollhouse scale, used for training homicide investigators. Eighteen of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are still in use for teaching purposes by the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, and the dioramas are also now considered works of art. 

She was born in Chicago in 1878. Her father, John Jacob Glessner, was an industrialist who became wealthy from International Harvester. She and her brother were educated at home; her brother went to Harvard, but she was not permitted to attend college. Instead, she married a lawyer, Blewett Lee. The marriage ended in divorce. When she expressed interest in forensic pathology years later, she was emphatically discouraged. She had to wait until a year after her brother's death, and in 1930 and took her first steps towards her own career at age 52. She inherited the Harvester fortune and she finally had the money to develop an interest in how detectives could examine clues. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Lee hosted a series of semi-annual seminars in homicide investigation. Detectives, prosecutors and other investigators were invited to a week-long conference, where she presented them with the "Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death," intricately constructed dioramas of actual crime scenes, complete with working doors, windows and lights. The 20 models were based on challenging cases and were designed to test the abilities of students to collect all relevant evidence. The models depicted multiple causes of death, and were based on autopsies and crime scenes that Lee visited. She paid extraordinary attention to detail in creating the models. The rooms were filled with working mousetraps and rocking chairs, food in the kitchens, and more, and the corpses accurately represented discoloration or bloating that would be present at the crime scene.

Frances used a scale of one inch to one foot. She made stockings 1/12 the size of the real thing by knitting them with straight pins. She once spent three days experimenting until she was satisfied she had created a realistic burn mark on a tiny ironing board. She reconstructed 19 death scenes in total, with a dedication to detail extending to wallpaper patterns and carpets. Most of her work was painstakingly completed while viewing it through a magnifying glass. What she couldn’t create, she hired out. In one crime scene, a local newspaper was found on the floor. She contracted a printer to produce a minuscule, one-off version of that very same issue, complete with a legible title. Frances hired a carpenter to create the furniture for her dioramas, an assignment for which he had to manufacture his own miniature tools. To clone an oil painting hung above a fireplace, she commissioned an artist to paint a tiny landscape of her own New Hampshire home.  Each model cost about $3,000-$4,500 to create.

Detectives, prosecutors and other investigators as students in the week-long conferences  were given 90 minutes to study the scene after which they had to summarize their observations and conclude whether the death was due to murder, suicide, or accident.  The week culminated in a banquet at the Ritz Carlton. Eighteen of the original Nutshells are still used today as teaching tools in forensic science, and if  you want to see the Nutshells for yourself, they are housed on the fourth floor of The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (the morgue) in Baltimore, Maryland.

LOG CABIN - In 1942, Arthur Roberts, a local insurance salesman, was found dead by police who responded to a call from a friend of the victim, Mrs Marian Chase.

PARSONAGE PARLOR - In 1946, Dorothy Dennison, a high school student, was found dead after being reported missing by her mother.

RED BEDROOM - In 1944, Marie Jones, a prostitute, was discovered dead by landlady, Mrs Shirley Flanagan.

LIVING ROOM - In 1941, Mrs Ruby Davis, a housewife, was discovered dead on the stairs by her husband, Reginald Davis.

DARK BATHROOM - In 1896, Maggie Wilson was found dead by Lizzie Miller.

THREE-ROOM DWELLING - In 1937, Robert Judson, a foreman in a shoe factory, his wife, Kate Judson, and their baby, Linda Mae Judson, were discovered dead by Paul Abbott, a neighbor.

THREE-ROOM DWELLING - being viewed in museum

THREE-ROOM DWELLING - being viewed in museum

BARN - In 1939, Eben Wallace, a local farmer, was found dead by his wife, Imelda.

The unexplained deaths of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon, who disappeared while hiking in Panama, is made especially unnerving by the evidence discovered during the search for the girls. The two dutch students were looking forward to volunteering with children and learning spanish during their trip to Panama, but did not get the chance to do either. On the 1st of April 2014 they set off into the forests around Baru Volcano, and were never seen alive again.

After the pair failed to attend a pre-arranged appointment on the 2nd of April the local police were alerted to their disappearance. The search involved aerial searches of the forest and enlisting local farmers and tribesmen to comb the local areas. As the days passed and the search continued to turn up nothing, special forces with dog units and detectives from the netherlands became involved.

Approximately 10 weeks after the search had started a Ngobe woman stumbled across a discarded backpack while she was tending to her rice paddy. The backpack contained items that belonged to both Froon and Kremers, including both their phones and Froon’s camera. Part of the tragedy of the situation is that the phones revealed they had made multiple attempts to contact the authorities, dialling both 911 (the emergency line in Panama) and 112 (the emergency line in the Netherlands).

The unnerving aspect of the discovery was the time stamps of when the phones were last switched on. The final time Kremer’s phone was switched on was the 11th of April, 10 days after the girls went missing. Numerous false pin numbers were entered into Kremer’s phone after the 7th of April, with no successful attempts. 77 emergency phone calls were placed by this phone between the 7th and 11th of April, before the phone was turned off and never switched on again.

The photographs taken on Froon’s camera add to the sinister mystery. There are photograph’s taken on the 1st of April, showing the girls on their hike, enjoying the views and the sun. Then there are a collection of photographs taken on the 8th of April, these were all taken between the hours of 01:00 and 04:00 am, at a rate of one taken every 2 minutes. They show the jungle in pitch black darkness,  In one photograph Kremer’s head appears to be visible, with blood staining her temple.

The bodies of the two women were discovered two weeks after the backpack was uncovered. Their bones were scattered along long distances of a river bank, Froon’s foot was found still inside her boot, while Kremer’s jean shorts were found neatly folded on a rock a few kilometres away from where the backpack and bones were found. Froon’s bones were discovered with some skin still attached to them, however Kremer’s bones appeared to have been bleached.

You might think you know what a Wendigo is, and I would wager that you would be right in most cases. However, folklore is rarely that simple - and so the definition of a Wendigo is somewhat liable to change based on the individual group of Algonquian people discussing it. There is one particularly intriguing story that comes out of the Lake Winnipeg area, which suggests that perhaps these malevolent cannibal spirits could even be aquatic on some occasions.

Wilma Raynor began her career as a nurse on a reserve in Alberta in 1944. She would help to set up nursing stations throughout the Canadian north, and would eventually become the nursing director for the Manitoba branch of the Canadian Red Cross Society after eighteen years of hard work. Throughout her many years, she heard countless tales of the terrifying Wendigo spirit, but she dismissed them all as 'ridiculous' until she witnessed something she couldn't quite explain...

She was working with a Cree community near the northern end of Lake Winnipeg, and one morning she caught sight of a girl quietly walking along the shore of the lake holding a pail. This girl was 19 years old, and her name was Christina. She briefly stood there, just staring out into the lake - before suddenly screaming in terror at something unseen and running for the nearest cabin. Christina found her mother in this cabin, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her down the shore of the lake. She desperately tried to point something out to her mother, but she strangely refused to look at whatever it was - and then pulled her daughter away from the lake to safety.

Presumably alarmed by this bizarre happening, Wilma made her way back the cabin. By the time she got there, it was already packed with concerned Cree neighbours, listening intently as Christina described her frightening vision. She had apparently seen a female figure stood in the water, which went up to her waist. There was long, dark hair hanging around her 'evil' face and she used a spindly arm to beckon for Christina to approach. Her mother claimed to have seen nothing, and noted that it was a 'hard struggle' to drag her daughter away from the potentially lethal water. Wilma was driven by this story to believe the assertion that Christina was nearly drawn into the water by a malevolent spirit of some kind. She gave Christina a sedative and kept her company while she calmed down.

However, the nightmarish influence of this watery Wendigo on the Cree community of Lake Winnipeg hadn't ceased yet. You see, it was apparent that the spirit wanted to claim a human life, and it wasn't going to rest until it had one. It laid in wait for months until a young Cree man came to visit Christina. He was a potential marriage partner for her, and after seeing his possible future wife, he decided to go skating on the frozen lake. You can guess how this ends.

The young man fell through a hole in the ice, and nearby people immediately rushed to the scene to try and save him from the freezing embrace of the water. However, they were ultimately unsuccessful - and the unfortunate suitor drowned in Lake Winnipeg. Intrigued by this harrowing incident, Wilma spoke to an older man in the Cree community about it - and what he had to say was shocking to say the least. He slowly shook his head and started, saying that he had never seen anything like it before. He had seen many people drown before, but never 'like that'.

The community members had apparently managed to find the hole in the ground into which the young man had fallen, and had shone a light down into it. They were able to see the man's head just underneath the ice. He was just floating there - 'like he just stand there'. Wilma visited the lake the next day, and likely felt a chill scuttle up her spine when she realised that the man had drowned in the same area from which the Wendigo had attempted to lure Christina.

Wilma told this terrifying story in 1957 in a short article called 'Windigo Woman' in issue 228 of a local newspaper for the Hudson Bay Company called The Beaver. It was originally meant for employees of the aforementioned company when it was first launched in the 1920s, but it had since expanded readership to all those with an interest in the Subarctic. Wilma apparently would've been writing both to inform and entertain. The newspaper in question is now simply called Canada's History.

Blair Adams was a Canadian man who died under mysterious and suspicious circumstances. His case remains unsolved, with no real clues as to why he was killed.

Adams was 31 years old and worked construction in Surrey, British Columbia. He was described by his friends to be a well liked person, as well as a hard worker, and wasn’t into drugs.

Days before his death, he started acting strange, claiming he was being followed by people who were going to kill him. On July 5, 1996, Adams took out all of the money in his savings account, amounting to almost $6,000, as well as thousands of dollars worth of jewelry and gold.

He tried to get leave to Canada through the Canadian/American border, but because he was a young man carrying a large amount of cash, he was profiled as a drug dealer and was refused entry.

The next day, he arrived at his job and quit. Adams then bought a $1,600 round trip ticked to Germany, but went to a friend’s house instead. He claimed that he needed help getting across the border because someone was trying to kill him, but the friend was unable to help. The day after this, he refunded his tickets, rented a car, and was able to cross the border and go into Seattle.

From there, he bought a one way ticket to Washington DC, and went to Knoxville after arriving there. He arrived at a gas station at 5:30 PM and told the employee that his car wouldn’t start. The employee told Adams that he had the wrong key for the car, even though he drove the car to this gas station with the key he had. He hitchhiked to a hotel. At the hotel, he entered and left the lobby five times before getting a room. An employee at the hospital described him as “paranoid…nervous, agitated, expecting someone to come in on him even though there wasn’t anybody there.  …he was waiting for somebody to walk in on him.” After getting a room, he left the hotel without entering the room and was never seen alive again. 7:37 PM was the last known time of him being alive.

His body was found 12 hours later in a parking lot half a mile from the hotel, naked from the waist down. It appeared that his pants had been forcibly removed. The cause of death was found to be a single punch to the stomach that was so powerful, it ruptured his internal organs. Scattered around Blair’s body was $4,000 in American, Canadian, and German currency, as well as a small pack that had $2,000 in gold and jewelry.

Although Blair thought his life was in danger, authorities believed the threat was imaginary and Blair traveled to different places to escape his delusions.

Sources/references:

http://unsolvedmysteries.wikia.com/wiki/Blair_Adams

The Most Violent Extraterrestrial Incident Ever Documented...

Published on 5 Aug 2021

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It is known as one of the most violent cases involving extraterrestrials ever to be documented. UFOs appeared in the skies above a small Brazilian city and discharged lights that caused injuries to many men, women and children. It is a rare case that culminated in at least two deaths and the alleged suicide of the Commander of the Brazilian Airforce.

And yet strangely, little is known about the Colares UFO flap outside of Brazil.

On the northeastern coast of Brazil lies the second largest of the Brazilian States - Para. Here the island city of Colares is separated from the mainland because of its location in the Amazon River delta as it empties into the Atlantic Ocean. During the late 1970s, at the time of the events in question, there were approximately 2,000 residents living there. Colares relied heavily on the simple professions of fishing and farming. This makes the occurrences seem all the more credible. There had been reports of strange incidents before, but most of the sightings began in August of 1977.

Abel Trindade was at home on the 14th of September 1977. It was 9.30pm and he was listening to the radio when he saw a blue light coming through the ceiling. He became paralyzed and unable to scream for help. After the incident, he suffered from a sore throat and headache for several days.

It was very early in the morning on the `4th of October in Belem Brazil. 48-year-old farmworker Benidito saw a bright blue light. It was hovering just above a treetop. It stayed there for a few seconds before slowly moving away. It made no noise and although Bendito was afraid he was unharmed.

Unlike another 40-year-old farm worker Manoel dos Santos just three weeks later. He was in bed when suddenly the interior of his house was lit up by a bright light that came through the roof. Manoel tried to get out of bed but he was paralyzed and unable to scream for help. After several minutes he could eventually stand up, but the left side of his body was both sore and numb for over a week. In the days that followed he would see many lights on the horizon very low in the sky, they would slow down, speed up and suddenly disappear.

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The scariest unexplained UFO case ever recorded.

Published on Jan 4, 2017

Leaked ATC audio: real voice of pilot Frederick Valentich, who disappeared after reporting a UFO