In 1991, more than 300,000 people searched for five schoolboys from Daegu. Their faces were on cigarette packs. In 2002, an acorn gatherer found them on the hill behind their homes.
Halloween 1974, Texas: five children got giant Pixy Stix stapled shut with cyanide inside. The man who handed them out was one boy’s father.
At 5pm Gus Lamont, 4, was playing outside his outback home. By 5:30 he was gone. A year of searching later, police say somebody knows something.
Police earned points for every “vagrant” sent to Busan’s Brothers Home. At least 657 died. The owner served two and a half years.
In 1925 Percy Fawcett, his son Jack and Raleigh Rimell walked into the Brazilian rainforest to find a lost city he called Z. His last letter came from Dead Horse Camp. The bones found later weren’t his.
In 1590 John White returned to Roanoke Island for his daughter, his granddaughter Virginia Dare and more than a hundred colonists. The houses were gone. CROATOAN was carved on a post, with no cross.
Leongatha, 2023: four guests ate beef Wellington at Erin Patterson’s table, and three died of death cap poisoning. On 30 October 2026 her appeal failed and she got life without parole.
On Diwali morning 2023, a Himalayan road tunnel in Uttarakhand caved in and trapped 41 workers. Giant drills broke. After 17 days, a team of rat-hole miners dug them out by hand.
In 2016, Mirna Salihin died after one sip of iced coffee in a Jakarta mall cafe. Her friend Jessica Wongso was convicted of cyanide murder, though no camera showed the poison going in and there was no full autopsy. Netflix’s Ice Cold reopened the debate.
Between 1982 and 1985, a masked gang killed 28 people in raids on Belgian shops and supermarkets, sometimes for champagne, coffee and cooking oil. Forty years, 593 DNA samples and 40 exhumations later, nobody knows who they were.
A French nurse vanished on a curfew night in 2020. Her husband was convicted of murder without a body. In July 2026 he confessed and led gendarmes to a field near Mailhoc.
Peru, 1985. With Joe Simpson hanging over a cliff in a storm, his partner Simon Yates cut the rope. Everyone believed Simpson was dead. Three days later he crawled back into base camp on a broken leg.
In October 1974, a Utah police chief’s 17-year-old daughter vanished after leaving a pizza restaurant. Ted Bundy was a suspect, but nobody was ever named. In 2026, a second girl’s DNA finally closed the case.
Tijuana police announced they had found Shayna Feinman, the Arizona woman missing since March 2024, alive. Her sister didn’t recognize the voice. Four days later, physical evidence said it was someone else. Two men were once charged in her disappearance; the charges were dropped, and she is still missing.
In 1984, divers searching Wast Water for a missing French student found a bundle that had been in the lake for eight years. The Lady in the Lake case: Margaret Hogg, her pilot husband, and the deep water that almost kept her.