Five of the Most Puzzling Unexplained Deaths on Unsolved Mysteries
The original Unsolved Mysteries had a surprising number of categories for their segments: “The Unexplained,” “Sci-Med,” “Wanted,” “Lost Loves,” “Legends,” “Ghosts,” “Missing” — even “Amnesia.” Then, of course, there was “Murder.”
Some murders, however, were filed under a more nebulous category: “Unexplained Death.” These cases included deaths whose true cause could not be determined, deaths officially ruled suicides that family members believed were foul play, deaths with baffling clues, and particularly senseless murders.
Here are five of the most puzzling “Unexplained Deaths,” along with my best guess as to what actually happened. I’ve included the season and episode numbers for each segment based upon the Unsolved Mysteries — Full Episodes YouTube channel, though they don’t always match up with the original run order. It was truly hard to choose, so expect a second list in the near future.
5. Charles Morgan (Season 3, Episode 9)
The circumstances of Chuck Morgan’s death in the desert near Tucson, AZ on August 11, 1977 read like a parody of a conspiracy theory. Shot in the back of the head with his own .357 magnum while wearing a bulletproof vest, the escrow lawyer had disappeared nine days before his body was found. A pair of sunglasses he did not own was found at the scene, as was a $2 bill — you know, those silly Jeffersons you sometimes got at the bank as a kid — pinned to his tighty-whities. Slick.
Scrawled on the bill in pen was a bunch of Da Vinci Code-level symbology. On the front (Jefferson) side was a list of seven Spanish surnames in alphabetical order: Acevedo, Bejarano, Cajero, Duarte, Encinas, Fuente, and Gradillas. “Ecclesiastes 12” appears above the names, with arrows pointing to the numbers 1 and 8 in the bill’s serial number. (We’ll get to Ecclesiastes in a moment.)
On the back, someone had numbered seven prominent figures in the engraving of Trunbull’s Declaration of Independence — presumably linking them to the names on the front, though what Ben Franklin or John Adams has to do with anything is anyone’s guess. A crude map of roads leading to Robles Junction and Sasabe, two towns south of Tucson near the Mexican border, was also there. So…yeah.
Taken as a whole, the information seems linked to cross-border smuggling of illegal substances and/or illegally-obtained money. As for the Biblical chapter and verse, Morgan’s wife had received a phone call from an anonymous woman pointing her to those passages days before. Even for a literature PhD like me, their relevance to Morgan’s situation isn’t clear; I suspect that the final, proverbial verse has the most meaning: “vanity of vanities…all is vanity.” The best I can come up with is that greed means little when you’re not alive to enjoy its fruits.
As an escrow lawyer, Morgan had participated in organized crime money laundering deals, which had skyrocketed in the 70s thanks to favorable state laws. Two months earlier, Morgan had vanished for three days before stumbling home at 2AM, handcuffed and clutching his throat. Via notepad, he told his wife the back of his throat had been painted with a hallucinogenic drug that would kill him if he spoke, that he was a secret agent for the Treasury Department, and that the family was in danger.
I lean toward the conclusion that Morgan was murdered because he shared information with the authorities in order to protect his own assets, though a staged suicide isn’t completely out of the question given the 007 101-level conspiracy theatrics. I doubt we’ll ever know the full story.
4. Dave Bocks (Season 6, Episode 17)
Unsolved Mysteries excelled at filming eerie moments that elevated merely perplexing stories to spine-tingling ventures into the uncanny valley.
In its segment about the disappearance and almost certain death of Ohio pipefitter Dave Bocks on June 19, 1984, that moment is the needle on a gauge slowly tracing a thin red spike. That’s the moment, people suspect, that Bocks’s body entered the 1300°F salt vat, causing a brief temperature drop at 5:15AM. When the oven was finally searched hours later, only a few charred bones, a steel-toed boot tip, keys and other equipment fragments, and a stainless steel wire with three loops in it were found.
Bocks worked at a secret government nuclear facility in Furnald, Ohio — one of the few plants in the country that produced high-grade uranium. At the time, however, neither the plant workers nor the community knew how radioactive the materials in the plant were. When that information leaked after an accident months later, many suggested that Bocks had been killed because he had tried to speak out. The local police barely investigated, insisting that there was no evidence of foul play.
Accused, the celebrated true crime podcast from the Cincinnati Inquirer, dedicated its third season to Bocks’s death. (There’s even a graphic novel version on their website.) After quickly ruling out suicide and accidental death due to the effort required to shimmy into the vat by oneself, host Amber Hunt and producer Amanda Rossmann consider the whistleblower theory but focus more on interpersonal tensions between Bocks and workers he had turned in for work infractions as a more likely motive.
It’s clear from interviews with former plant workers that some of them, including Bocks’s former supervisor, know more than they’re saying. The exact circumstances and reasons for Bocks’s death, however, remain a sickening puzzle. The bone fragments couldn’t be tested for DNA at the time and have been lost since, so we can’t even say for sure they belong to Bocks. Worst of all, though, is the possibility that Bocks may have been conscious when he entered the vat.
3. Judy Smith (Season 12, Episode 11)
Nothing about Judy Smith’s death makes sense, starting with the 50 year-old newlywed forgetting to bring any ID to board the April 10, 1997 flight she and her husband Jeff were taking from Boston to Philadelphia. Why would she leave all forms of ID at home when going on a trip? (She caught a later flight to Philly that day.)
Judy was accompanying her attorney husband to a conference he was attending in order to do some sightseeing. When she failed to meet him at the end of the first day, he reported her missing.
Five months later, her body was discovered partially buried over 600 miles away in the Pisgah National Forest outside of Asheville, North Carolina — a place she had never visited before. Alongside her skeletal remains were a bra with cuts and puncture wounds, a blue-and-black backpack that didn’t match her trademark red one, a pair of expensive sunglasses her family didn’t recognize, as well as her wedding ring and nearly $200.
Four eyewitnesses recounted meeting Judy in Asheville, including a store clerk who found Judy calm and pleasant. Judy shared that she was from Boston, that her name was Judy, that her husband was at an attorney convention in Pennsylvania, and that she had decided to take a trip — making it almost certain that this woman was, in fact, Judy Smith.
Friends speculate that she wanted to get some distance from her husband and, a consummate traveler, had decided on the spur of the moment to head down to the mountains of Asheville.
The authorities’ — and my — best guess is that Judy encountered someone near or at the place where she was found. Perhaps that person — almost certainly a male — offered to show her a spectacular view in order to get her alone; perhaps she stumbled upon him minutes before he attacked her. It’s even possible that she met this person in the city proper and took a ride with him, since there’s no evidence that she rented a car, public transportation in Asheville is terrible, and the location where her body was found was nowhere near to the retail store she was seen.
I currently live less than 20 miles due north from where Judy’s body was found, and it’s a haunting mystery. Without knowing where she first encountered her murderer, it’s especially hard to say what the motive was.-Some have speculated that Gary Hilton — also known as the National Forest Serial Killer — was involved, but he robbed his victims. None of Judy’s valuables — including straight up, untraceable cash — were taken. The puncture wounds and cuts to her bra suggest a sexual motive but could also just indicate stab wounds to the chest. I’d love to see a resolution to this case — but how?
2. Chaim Weiss (Season 4, Episode 25)
This segment has haunted me like few others, thanks to an atmospheric — albeit, in retrospect, uncomfortably exoticizing — portrait of an Orthodox Jewish school, or yeshiva. Minor-key Hebrew music plays over shots of rabbis conducting services and shots of men in Orthodox dress and payot walking by jewelry store windows laden with gold. (As one self-identified Orthodox commenter on the Sitcoms Online message forum about this case put it, “UM made it seem like a cheder from Fiddler on the Roof in terms of tone, which is super irritating.”)
“Observant Orthodox Jews live according to strict codes of social and moral conduct which have remained unchanged for centuries,” Robert Stack solemnly instructs 90’s-era Middle America. “Hours of daily prayer and a rigid dietary regime [sic] are among the ancient rituals which guide the Orthodox Jew through birth, marriage, and death.”
Not that there weren’t some obstacles due to the insular nature of the yeshiva and the tenets of Orthodox Judaism. Since the murder happened on the Sabbath, for instance, police could not talk to anyone or take statements until the sun had set on the holy day. However, the segment leans a little too hard into this idea, portraying the silence of the yeshiva’s students and faculty as a sign of Orthodox Judaism’s secretive nature rather than simple lack of knowledge about the crime.
According to Nassau County detective Don Daly, the scene suggested that the perpetrator not only knew Orthodox rituals but also considered them important. After Chaim had been killed in bed, his body was moved to two separate spots on the floor — apparently because tradition dictates moving a body to the coolest and lowest point of a room. Chaim was taking antibiotics for a throat infection at the time, yet a window had been left open despite the cold air. Again, Daily insists that this was done to let the spirit out. Google research hasn’t confirmed whether he’s right or not.
One ritual stood out not for what it was but when. Someone entered Chaim’s sealed-off dorm room to place a second yahrzeit, or memorial, candle on the bedside table. A shimmer spooky of music accompanies this second, taller candle in the segment, materializing like a ghost. It’s eerie. No one admitted to placing it there.
Most puzzling, though, is the question Robert Stack asks as the segment draws to a close: “Why would anyone brutally murder a 15 year-old boy with no known enemies?”
Chaim was one of only two students who had a single room in his dormitory building at the Torah High School in Long Beach. He was last seen by fellow students at 1AM on Halloween night, 1986. Since no one could turn on electricity during the Sabbath, he was reading under the hallway light that was always left on. At some point after he turned in, someone severed his spinal cord with a single blow to the back of his head.
Posts from former students take issue with many of the claims provided in the segment. Most notably, they insist that the LI police were wrong to claim that their religious beliefs prevented them from sharing any suspicions about possible suspects. Many also highlight the presence of an anti-Semitic janitor employed there who would often be heard ranting about Jews, as well as broken door and window locks on the yeshiva door.
A 2017 article, however, claims that the police ruled that man out. Chaim’s father pointed to suspicious behavior from one of the yeshiva’s rabbis, who had visited the family home on Staten Island twice over the summer holiday to speak to Chaim, who was away at the time. Chaim never told his parents what the issue was. While some kind of abuse at the school the rabbi wanted kept quiet can’t be ruled out, given what we’re finding out about privately-run schools and rampant abuse, it’s hard to imagine that killing Chaim alone would ensure silence. The FBI apparently speculated the crime was committed by someone closer to Chaim’s age: perhaps a student jealous of his popularity and intelligence?
It’s possible. Anything seems possible, frankly, with such a senseless death. Sadly, I doubt we’ll ever know.
1. Aileen Conway (Season 1, Episode 1)
A master bathtub filled with soapy water, a white rotary phone sitting on its marbled rim, the receiver off the hook. A garden hose dribbling water into the backyard pool. A plugged-in iron radiating heat from its resting position on the board. And, 15 miles away, a charred-to-unrecognizable body inside a burning car that had crashed into a bridge at 50–60mph.
The car belonged to Lawton, OK resident Pat Conway, and the body inside was his wife of 33 years, Aileen. Yet she had left her purse with her driver’s license and glasses behind in the house. The patio door was left wide open, too. And neither Pat nor Aileen had ever driven to that area before.
Near the site of what the state highway patrol initially ruled an accident, a church bulletin Pat Conway had placed on the car’s dashboard lay unburned in the grass. Aileen never drove with the windows down, though she never drove without her glasses or license, either. Upon closer inspection, a fire marshal noticed the car’s gas cap had been removed, and burn tests suggested the presence of an accelerant .
One of the first cases ever featured on Unsolved Mysteries, Aileen Conway’s death still baffles 35 years on. The most likely foul play theory, which Pat subscribed to in the segment, is that robbers entered the home believing it was empty and killed her to prevent identification. Nearby homes had been broken into around the same time. Still, why force her into her car and drive her miles away? Why was nothing taken? More recently, some have speculated that Aileen suffered a health emergency that led her to jump in her car — but that doesn’t explain the fire.
No one explanation fits every detail of the scene, and the oddity of the situation is even stranger in such a benign, small-town Midwest setting. Despite being one of the first to air, this death continues to be one of the strangest unsolved mysteries ever featured on the show.
