Mysteries and Histories

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.

Throughout the 1980s, women and girls were found murdered near Ohio highways and truck stops. Several victims were sex workers, and investigators suspected a killer who travelled the interstate routes. One chilling lead gave the case its name: a truck driver reportedly used the CB radio handle “Dr. No.

Witness accounts and similarities between the deaths suggested a connection, but investigators struggled to establish which murders belonged to the same series. The truck stops offered a disturbing advantage: an offender could encounter a victim and leave the area before anyone realised she was missing.

Decades later, DNA linked former trucker Samuel Legg III to several truck-stop killings from the 1990s, prompting claims that Dr. No had been caught. But those discoveries did not conclusively identify the offender behind the earlier series. The “Dr. No” mystery remains unresolved, including whether one killer was responsible for all the deaths attributed to him.

In August 1951, hundreds of people in the French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit fell ill with stomach pains, insomnia, and terrifying hallucinations. Some believed animals were attacking them; others became dangerously disoriented. Several people died, and dozens were admitted to psychiatric hospitals as doctors struggled to explain the outbreak.

Investigators traced the poisoning to bread from a local bakery. Doctors initially blamed ergot, a fungus that contaminates grain and can cause convulsions and hallucinations. But that explanation remained disputed, with later researchers proposing mercury contamination or other chemicals used in flour production.

The incident became known as the “cursed bread” affair. Claims of a secret CIA experiment involving LSD added another layer of intrigue, but remain unproven. More than 70 years later, the precise cause of the poisoning is still debated, a haunting mystery rooted in something as ordinary as a loaf of bread.

In January 1989, Chicago television station WMAQ ended its overnight broadcast with a haunting missing-person notice: a grainy photograph, the name Joanna Lopez, and a phone number. There was no age, no description, and no explanation of when or where she had disappeared.

Decades later, the footage drew internet sleuths into a mystery with remarkably little evidence. Researchers reported finding no matching entry in major missing-person databases, leaving Joanna’s identity and the circumstances behind the broadcast unverified.

Was she a missing girl whose story slipped through the records or was there another explanation? The notice exists, but it does not establish what happened to her. And the lack of records is not proof she never existed: the mystery remains unresolved.

On October 13, 1972, a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team, relatives, and friends crashed high in the Andes while travelling to Chile. There were 45 people aboard. Those who survived the impact faced freezing temperatures, serious injuries, and almost no food, then an avalanche buried their makeshift shelter inside the wreckage, killing eight more.

With rescue no longer coming and their supplies exhausted, the survivors made an agonising decision: to eat the bodies of those who had died. They sheltered in the broken fuselage and relied on one another while two of the men, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, eventually trekked across the mountains for ten days to find help.

Their journey led rescuers back to the wreckage. On December 22 and 23, the remaining survivors were airlifted to safety, ending an ordeal lasting 72 days. Sixteen people returned alive, a story of devastating loss, impossible choices, and extraordinary determination to survive.

On March 18, 1937, a massive explosion tore through a school in New London, Texas, shortly before the end of the school day. Nearly 300 people, most of them children, were killed as the building collapsed, turning an ordinary afternoon into the deadliest school disaster in U.S.

To save money, the school had switched to a nearby oil company’s residue gas supply. A faulty connection allowed odorless gas to collect beneath the building, unnoticed until a spark from an electric sanding machine ignited it. Parents and oil-field workers rushed to the wreckage, searching for children beneath the rubble.

The tragedy changed gas safety. Texas passed a law requiring a distinctive smell to be added to natural gas so people could detect leaks, a practice that became an industry standard. The familiar warning smell in gas today carries a legacy rooted in New London’s devastating loss.

In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming noticed something strange in a contaminated Petri dish at his London laboratory: bacteria would not grow around a patch of mould. The substance responsible, which he named penicillin, would transform medicine, but discovering it was only the beginning.

More than a decade later, Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and their Oxford colleagues, including Norman Heatley, turned Fleming’s observation into a treatment that could save lives. During the Second World War, British and American researchers and manufacturers overcame enormous production challenges to make the drug widely available.

Penicillin helped turn once-deadly bacterial infections into treatable illnesses, and Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize. Behind the famous story of an accidental discovery was a much bigger achievement: years of teamwork that brought a laboratory breakthrough to patients around the world.

On March 13, 1973, University of Iowa student Sarah Ann Ottens was found dead in her dorm room at Rienow Hall. Much of the campus had emptied for spring break, but Sarah had stayed behind. She had been brutally beaten and strangled.

Fellow student James Wendell Hall was convicted of her murder in 1974 and sentenced to 50 years in prison. But in 1983, his conviction was overturned after evidence emerged that prosecutors had withheld information that could have helped his defence.

No one else has ever been charged. More than half a century later, Sarah’s murder remains unsolved, a case marked not only by a young woman’s violent death, but by a conviction that failed to withstand scrutiny.

On June 8, 1924, British climbers George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappeared into the clouds high on Mount Everest while attempting to become the first people to reach its summit. Neither returned, leaving a question that has haunted mountaineering for a century: did they reach the top before they died?

Mallory’s body was discovered in 1999, but it did not settle the mystery. Then, in September 2024, a National Geographic team found a boot containing a foot and a sock labelled “A.C. Irvine”, remains believed to belong to his missing climbing partner.

Their camera, which might hold photographs of a successful ascent, remains missing. The discoveries have brought the climbers’ final journey into sharper focus, but whether Mallory and Irvine conquered Everest remains unanswered.