image courtesy of Netflix
CW: abuse, bigotry, murder, trauma
This program is about unsolved mysteries. Whenever possible, the actual family members and police officials have participated in recreating the events. What you are about to see is not a news broadcast. – intro to the early seasons
This past July, Netflix introduced a revised version of Unsolved Mysteries, one of the longest-running and best-known documentary series to run on American network tv. For turn of the century viewers (that’s you, 90s kids), there’s something about the original show that has set the tone for documentaries dealing with the unknown The eerie theme music and warped, oozing logo were peak creepy. At least Are You Afraid of the Dark and the Goosebumps series were made up stories. Everything on Unsolved Mysteries was seemingly real.
Unsolved Mysteries began as a series of hour-long specials airing in 1987. The first few were hosted by Raymond Burr and Karl Malden, but they demanded higher salaries. Robert Stack hosted the fourth special, and something clicked. Burr had an almost grandfatherly energy, and Malden looked like a poser in his trench coat and fedora. But Stack, whose own coat recalled his fictionalized version of Eliot Ness on The Untouchables (1959-1963), sounded charismatic and mysterious. Three specials later, and on Wednesday October 5, 1988, Unsolved Mysteries debuted as a regular series on NBC.
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After a going out to hunt, teenagers Don Henry and Kevin Ives were found lying motionless directly in the path of an oncoming train. When high concentrations of THC were found in their systems, their deaths were declared an accident. Subsequent investigation revealed injuries inflicted to the boys’ bodies prior to the train, and a much lower quantity of cannabis inhaled. Local police reported seeing a mysterious figure in the same area the night the boys died; he wore military fatigues and fired a revolver at one officer. It is presumed Don and Kevin possibly saw something they weren’t supposed to, and that the unidentified figure is involved, but the connection has never been confirmed, and the boys’ murders remain unsolved.
Appearing in the second episode of the series in 1988, the “boys on the tracks” is one of the show’s first and most haunting unsolved mysteries. In the segment, Don and Kevin’s parents are particularly offended by the implication of their sons dying because they were “doped up” and passed out, highlighting how conservative the culture around cannabis was in the same decade that gave rise to cocaine. The high strangeness of the situation is a prime example of why people tuned in every Sunday evening, even kids who had nightmares the previous week.
Unsolved Mysteries segments were divided into the following category headlines: Missing, Wanted, Unexplained Death, Legends, Treasure, Sci-Med, Lost Loves, and the Unexplained, among a few others. Segments were frequently updated as new information came in and cases were solved, causing stories to be deleted or moved in reruns. Famous mysteries covered include: the Mary Celeste, Amelia Earhardt, King Tut’s curse, reincarnation, Shondra Levy, the Nazca lines, the Cleveland Torso Murders, Padre Pio, the Shroud of Turin, the Gray Man, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, the Green River Killer, the disappearance of Agatha Christie, the Unabomber, and the assassinations of Huey Long, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among many, many others.
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Unsolved Mysteries initially aired on network tv, and thus rarely showed graphic crime scene photos, and often toned down more gruesome aspects in their reenactments. One late season exception shows a grim morgue photo of a battered John Doe who was a victim of elder abuse, warning viewers beforehand that the image is “difficult to view” (this case is now solved). While a few reenactments have laughable acting, many depictions of kidnappings, assaults, and brutal murders are nevertheless still jarring in their realism. And the music only makes them more intense.
As said in the intro, many individuals played themselves in reenactments. Their acting is often clumsy but always sincere and sometimes even good. Many others opted to be portrayed by actors rather than reenact events that were too traumatic for them. A few well-known names appeared on the show before they were famous. Matthew McConaughey, Cheryl Hines, and Daniel Dae Kim among others all appeared in segment reenactments. Before starring in Deadwood and Supernatural, Jim Beaver, a historian as well as an actor, was interviewed in a segment on the murder of George Reeves. Established celebrities appear in a few stories as well, including Jon Bon Jovi as a family friend in a hit-and-run case, and Reggie White, whose church was hit by arson in 1996.
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Like much of British Columbia, Cadboro Bay is home to First Nations accounts of a sea serpent. In the 20th Century, this creature has been dubbed cadborosaurus, or Caddy. A supposed carcass of one was discovered in the stomach of a sperm whale in 1937, but it was dismissed as a whale fetus, and discarded. In the decades following, numerous sightings would be reported. A fisherman named William Hagelund claimed he caught a baby cadborosaurus in 1968, but was afraid it would not survive long out of the water. After “a great bit of soul-searching,” Hagelund released the creature back into the bay. Sightings of Caddy continue today.
There are simply not enough cryptids covered on Unsolved Mysteries. There’s a few well-known examples, yetis, bigfoot, Chupacabras, and the Mothman, for instance. There are three separate segments on Canadian sea monsters: Champ in Lake Champlain on the Quebec-Vermont border, Caddy, and Ogopogo in BC’s Okanagan Lake.
Most cryptid cases are fun because they’ll never really be “officially solved,” as long as there are woods and bodies of water. Not all of them are so lucky, though. The Minnesota Iceman, a mysterious frozen hominid in a 1994 episode, ended up on an episode of Shipping Wars in 2013.
There are many UFO stories, however, most of them well-known (Roswell, Allagash, Phoenix). Maybe it’s that more recent shows like Ancient Aliens have made it impossible to take these stories even half-seriously anymore. Maybe we’re too cynical to care if there’s life on other planets anymore. But these segments feel silly now. When the revised Netflix series included one UFO encounter out of six new stories, there were a few groans on social media.
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In 1932, miners Cecil Mayne and Frank Carr were dynamiting in the San Pedro Mountains when they discovered a cave containing a tiny mummified body, only fourteen inches tall. The ancient remains were interpreted by many as proof of Shoshoni stories about an ancient race of warlike little people. When the mummy was x-rayed in the 1950s, however, pathologists concluded the remains were an infant with anencephaly, a fatal condition in which the cranium and brain do not fully develop. The San Pedro Mountains Mummy was last known to be held by a Dr. Leonard Wadler, but was not in his possession when he died in the 1980s. The mummy has never been located.
Revisiting media of our childhoods, we often find ourselves leaving with a different perspective than before. As a kid, Unsolved Mysteries represented both the darkness and the wonder our world is capable of. Decades on, it still means very much the same thing, but the details are different.
The mystery and intrigue of a story can mask more troubling implications. The San Pedro Mountains Mummy creeped me out as a four-year-old, but at thirty, the story feels tragic and exploitative. Even the show notes that, if recovered, the mummy would be subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Ultimately, the mystery of the mummy’s origins distracts from the issue of plundering sites sacred to Indigenous People.
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The series also has a mixed record on how it depicts othered, marginalized, and disenfranchised people. A segment on trans woman Liz Carmichael, believed to have committed investment fraud with a three-wheeled “car of the future” called the Dale, refers to Carmichael as she, but treats their pretransition background with sensationalist undertones, as if it is just another part of Carmichael’s deception. And while investigating the murder of dogbreeder Cam Lyman, who took animal steroids as a form of hormone therapy and had legally changed his name, the show repeatedly misgenders Lyman, presumably to appease his clearly disapproving family. The casual misgendering of Kelci “Saff” Saffery in the recent Tiger King documentary reminds us how little things have really changed.
Predictably, many of the show’s shortcomings come out of the meek, toothless social justice of late Eighties neoliberalism, given only token lip service by Reagan while his presidency ignored AIDS, mental health research, and the failures of Reaganomics. Unsolved Mysteries debuted at the end of this dangerous administration, when puffed-up nationalist pride was at a fever pitch in an America high on apple pie. This is evident in the show’s reverent tone toward religion and law enforcement. In the Eighties, evangelical Christianity was the major moral language of the United States. Segments on purported Christian miracles are numerous; examples from other faiths and philosophies are rare, and typically smack of exoticism, such as a segment on a set of Baule fertility statues from Ivory Coast which supposedly aid in pregnancy.
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“If you’ve ever been stopped for a traffic ticket, you might’ve noticed that the officer approached cautiously. Imagine what’s going through his mind; you know who he is because of his uniform,
but he has no idea who you are. To him it could be another routine traffic violation. Then again, it could be that one case when the unexpected happens, and his life is on the line.” – Introduction to a segment on a murdered cop in rural Virginia.
In the early Nineties, Tammy Papler ran a massage parlor in Oak Grove, KY, which included sex work. The local police were aware of the operation, and took advantage of this by extorting money from the business. According to Papler, a patrolman and customer named Ed Carter was kicked out of the parlor for overstepping the arrangement. A few weeks later, an unknown perpetrator murdered two of the parlor’s employees, Candy Belt and Gloria Ross, slitting their throats and shooting them execution-style. Papler accused Carter of the murders, and Carter’s wife disputed his alibi. Carter took a polygraph; the results were not released, but he resigned immediately after. Afraid that the town would simply forget about the murders of two sex workers, Tammy Papler expressed her frustrations to the Oak Grove city council. One councilwoman, who was a former employee at the parlor, confirmed her story. At the end of the segment, Tammy says: “Most of all I want Glory and Candy to know that we fought for them, and that we’re gonna see justice served for them.” Though charges were brought in 2016, the case is still open.
For all its implicit support of authority, Unsolved Mysteries did not shy away from highlighting cases in which the police and military were clearly responsible either directly or from sheer incompetence. Many segments follow military coverups (UFOs and murder!), while others focus on cops abusing their power or simply dropping the ball on a case out of incompetence or just callousness. In one segment, a vindictive former cop (played by horror icon Bill Moseley) tries to hold an elementary school hostage in Cokeville, WY with a homemade bomb, but the explosion kills only himself and his wife in the process. The show presents this story as one of its “Miracles” segments.
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The show could also be playful and corny, not always on purpose. Introducing a segment on spontaneous human combustion, Stack stands next to a gas flame, which flares up dramatically with his monologue. In another segment, the show follows a police bloodhound named Yogi, which would be charming if it weren’t in pursuit of a kidnapped child (who was found dead in the area the next day). And an entire segment on a haunted comedy club can’t be too serious on principle. Some of the weaker segments smack strongly of fame-chasing, but still give those fifteen minutes. Many consider the series low point a segment on aphrodisiacs, particularly one man’s luck with some exotic boner chocolates. Not particularly mysterious, but judging from Stack’s wry closing monologue, maybe more than a little self-aware.
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When people talk about Unsolved Mysteries, they rarely discuss the Lost Loves segments, in which the mystery is usually an individual who was separated from their birth family trying to locate them. In a few unique cases, people look for someone who had saved them from death, worked with them at a difficult job, or were merely there for them during a difficult time. Updates for these segments are numerous, and usually very positive, but few of these stories are well remembered now. There’s that cynicism again. Reunions with loved ones could be the highlight of a show which deals in the colossal uncertainty of our lives. Yet, seeing these everyday people receive their closure just doesn’t have the same allure to viewers as haunted houses, missing teens, and legends of buried treasure.
As a teenager, Cathy Loving was sexually abused by her stepfather, a respected Chicago police detective named Clifford Sparks, numerous times. Her attempts to run away from home failed, her claims were ignored, and her case files conveniently disappeared. On her way to a state reformatory school in 1961, she plead her case to a deputy sheriff, who listened and took action. Through his efforts, Loving was able to be emancipated and released from the state school. As an adult, she would start a counseling group for abused children, and attempt to locate the man who believed her via a Lost Loves segment in a 1991 episode. Former Deputy Sheriff Fred Douglas Lyle saw the segment, and was reunited with Loving in a later update the following year.
It is easy to feel cynical after watching Unsolved Mysteries. To stream the first episode and see a segment on an unsolved murder in your birthplace of Lawton, Oklahoma, the mysterious death of housewife Aeileen Conway, a case with no update, can leave one with some sense of despair. Even cases with happy endings carry with them years, even decades of grief or uncertainty for everyday people who only want answers. Since first airing, Unsolved Mysteries had aided in solving over 260 cases. Older cases are solved every year, thanks to DNA testing, and organizations such as the Doe Network and the Charley Project. Within months of the FilmRise relaunch in 2017, the case of Top Ten Most Wanted fugitive Donald Eugene Webb, mentioned in the very first special, was finally closed with the discovery of his death. But for every case solved, there are still missing people who have never been found, murderers who have never been caught, and victims who remain unidentified.
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There are so, so many unsolved disappearances and murders where you just know the boyfriend/husband did it.
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Robert Stack died in 2003. Five years later, Spike TV “revised” the series with another host Dennis Farina,. Unfortunately, the segments were all repackaged versions of the old stories with the original reenactments and interview, now with new graphics, bad new music, and only a few updates. Between October 2008 and April 2010, this version ran through one large season of 175 episodes, just under half as many as the original series, without a single brand new segment.
In January of 2017, FilmRise repackaged and reissued the Robert Stack episodes of Unsolved Mysteries, making them officially available for streaming for the first time. Most importantly, several old cases included extensive updates, complete with original “bulletin” music. Why now? Was it just nostalgia? Post-election, after a decade of reactionary rhetoric, with the seeming turn-of-the-millennium prosperity a distant memory, did a Nineties series with a reputation for sending kids cowering behind the couch seem somehow quaint and familiar in comparison? By 2018, rumors were spreading of a Netflix revival in the works.
Unsolved Mysteries wasn’t the first show to juxtapose true crime cases with unusual occurrences and supernatural events, but few have been as influential. The Nineties would be crowded with imitators and torchbearers, most with a smaller focus and noticeably smaller budgets. Cold Case Files also boasted a charismatic narrator in Bill Kurtis, but was even darker, with plenty of graphic images from crime scenes and exhumations, the horror to Unsolved Mysteries’ terror. Some followers like the History Channel’s History’s Mysteries are also fondly remembered (and pirated), while others like Beyond Bizarre are long out of print and nearly forgotten. Today, BuzzFeed Unsolved and a host of YouTube channels continue the tradition with discussions of the darker side. Even longform true crime docs like Tiger King, The People vs. O. J. Simpson, and Making of a Murderer lift from the Unsolved Mysteries playbook. Uncertain narratives, unanswered questions, and a frustrated sense of justice.
And the music. Besides Doctor Who or The X-Files, is there is a creepier tv show theme than that of Unsolved Mysteries? Greg Remal Malkin’s incidental music for the original series includes sly noir chase sequences, melodramatic piano, sheets of programmed synth noise, and even acoustic pieces for mysteries in rural settings. Plus, lots and lots of 80s synthesizer. In recent years, two volumes of the show’s “Original Broadcast Soundtrack” have been issued on vinyl by Terror Vision Records, the synthwave and verbed-out punch made popular again by shows like Stranger Things, whose producers have a hand in the revised Netflix series. Some have criticized the revised series for having only one mystery per episode, not enough reenactments, and no narrator (though a ghostly image of Stack appears behind the title card). Usage of the original theme, however, has been praised.
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At the end of an episode, Stack would frequently sign off with this: “For every mystery, there is someone, somewhere, who knows the truth. Perhaps that someone is watching. Perhaps it’s you.” For all the fantastic possibilities of the more surreal and otherworldly mysteries covered on this show, it is always the disappearances and deaths which people come back to, always these stories that they remember. To some extent, it’s the morbid possibilities: this could be your life. It could happen to anybody. Our world is random and cruel. No one can be trusted, not even authorities, nothing is as it seems.
And then there are the cases solved. Any one of us can be, at any moment, the subject of a mystery. Lose a friend, a loved one, to the air or to violence, you want someone to make it right, whether it’s the untrustworthy authorities or another someone just watching a spooky show on tv. Any one of us can be, at any moment, someone’s closure, an answer, a mercy, maybe even something resembling justice. Maybe just a slamming door. Perhaps it’s you.
Originally from Oklahoma, Seth Copeland currently teaches and studies in Milwaukee. His work has appeared in Kestrel, Yes Poetry, Heavy Feather Review, Dream Pop, and Theta Wave, among others. He is the founding editor of petrichor, an archive of text & image. https://neutralspaces.co/seth_t_copeland/ / twitter @SethTCopeland / https://petrichormag.com/