Mysteries and Histories

In January 1968, 18-year-old Iowa State freshman Sheila Jean Collins was trying to get home to Evanston, Illinois, for the weekend. When her boyfriend could not drive her, she accepted a ride from someone who had found her name on the university’s ride board, without ever learning the driver’s name.

Sheila was last seen waiting with her suitcase in Ames on January 26. Two days later, her body was found in a rural ditch near Colo, Iowa. She had been strangled with a nylon cord, and investigators believed she was killed elsewhere before being left there.

Her murder remained unsolved for 55 years. No arrest has been made, and the person who offered Sheila that final ride has never been publicly identified.

In February 2009, 44-year-old Lesley Herring vanished from her Los Angeles home, leaving behind her car, phone, keys, purse, jewellery, and savings. Her husband, Lyle, claimed she had simply left but a Starbucks receipt found in her purse appeared to show she had bought coffee days after she disappeared.

It was meant to be proof she was alive. Instead, investigators checked the café’s CCTV and found Lyle buying the coffee himself. Detectives concluded he had planted the receipt to create a false timeline and divert suspicion.

Lesley’s body was never found, but cadaver dogs detected the scent of human remains in two of Lyle’s vehicles, and evidence showed him staging calls and disposing of belongings. In 2013, he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years to life.

On Christmas Eve 2010, Lori Erica Ruff died by suicide outside her in-laws’ home in Texas. Afterward, her family found a box of documents revealing that “Lori” had built her life on the identity of a child who had died years earlier. Even her husband had not known her real name.

Investigators traced the paperwork back to 1988, when she obtained identification as Becky Sue Turner, then legally changed that name to Lori Erica Kennedy. She later married and had a daughter, but the documents offered no clear path to the person she had been before.

In 2016, genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick used DNA and family records to identify her as Kimberly McLean, who had left her Pennsylvania home at 18. Her mother’s DNA confirmed the match. Kimberly’s identity was finally known; why she chose to erase her past so completely remains uncertain.

In October 1976, a farmer harvesting corn near Otterbein, Indiana, found a small cardboard box about 15 yards from the road. Inside was the body of an older woman who had been shot in the back of the head. For almost 50 years, she was known only as the “Box Lady of Benton County.”

In 2026, genetic genealogy finally identified her as Jane Hart, a 69-year-old woman who had been living in Chicago around the time of her death. Her identity was restored but the person who killed her, and the reason she ended up in a rural Indiana cornfield, remain unknown.

In 2002, a quiet Ohio man named Joseph Newton Chandler III died by suicide in his Eastlake apartment. He left behind $82,000, but no family, no clear past, and a name that turned out to belong to an eight-year-old boy killed in a Texas car crash in 1945.

For years, authorities had no idea who the adult “Chandler” really was. He had acquired the dead child’s identity in 1978 and lived under it for decades, carefully cutting himself off from people and paperwork.

In 2018, genetic genealogy finally identified him as Robert Ivan Nichols: a World War II veteran and Purple Heart recipient from Indiana who had once had a wife and three children, then vanished from their lives in the 1960s.

The name was solved, but the real mystery remains: why did Nichols abandon his family, steal a dead child’s identity, and spend the rest of his life hiding? No definitive answer has ever emerged.

In October 2006, a man harvesting dogwood plants found a young woman’s remains in a marshy field near the Darlington Nuclear Plant in Bowmanville, Ontario. Investigators estimated she was 18 to 25 years old and that she may have died years before she was discovered.

She was found with a ring marked “Burns,” but no identification. Police believe she was likely murdered; modern DNA analysis indicates African and Southeast Asian ancestry, possibly with Caribbean roots.

Nearly two decades later, Bowmanville Jane Doe still has no name, and no one has been charged in her death.

In 1887, reporter Nellie Bly faked mental illness to be committed to New York City’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. For ten days, she witnessed cold baths, rotten food, beatings, neglect, and women held there despite showing no sign of mental illness.

Her exposé, Ten Days in a Mad-House, shocked the public and helped secure increased funding and reforms for the institution. More broadly, it changed journalism: Bly proved that going undercover could expose abuses that officials preferred to keep hidden.

Two years later, she became a global celebrity by travelling around the world alone in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, beating Jules Verne’s fictional 80-day journey. But it was her time inside the asylum that made Nellie Bly a pioneer of investigative reporting.

On the morning of February 10, 1990, two armed men walked into Las Cruces Bowl in New Mexico, forced seven people into an office, stole less than $5,000 from the safe, and shot every victim before setting the room on fire.

Steven Teran, 26; his two-year-old daughter, Valerie; six-year-old Paula Holguin; and 13-year-old Amy Houser were killed in the attack. Three others survived: bowling-alley manager Stephanie Senac, her 12-year-old daughter Melissa Repass, and cook Ida Holguin. Senac died in 1999 from complications connected to the wounds she suffered, bringing the death toll linked to the massacre to five.

More than 35 years later, no one has been charged. The two gunmen have never been identified, and the Las Cruces Police Department still considers the case open, one of New Mexico’s most devastating unsolved crimes.

In 1796, English doctor Edward Jenner noticed a local belief that milkmaids who caught cowpox, a usually mild disease, seemed protected from smallpox, one of history’s deadliest infections. He tested the idea by taking material from a cowpox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes’s hand and inoculating eight-year-old James Phipps.

James became mildly ill, recovered, and later did not develop smallpox when Jenner tested whether the cowpox exposure protected him. The experiment was ethically unacceptable by modern standards, but it demonstrated the principle behind vaccination: safely training the immune system to recognize a dangerous disease.

Jenner did not invent the broader idea of inoculation, earlier practices such as variolation already existed but his cowpox-based method was far safer and became the first successful vaccine. The word “vaccine” itself comes from vacca, Latin for cow.

Almost two centuries later, worldwide vaccination campaigns led the World Health Organization to declare smallpox eradicated in 1980, the only human disease ever eradicated globally.

In December 1996, 12-year-old Celina Mays went to bed after church at her family’s home in Willingboro, New Jersey. She was nine months pregnant and due to give birth within weeks. By morning, she was gone, her blankets had been arranged over pillows to make it look as though she was still asleep, while her purse, prenatal vitamins, and other belongings remained behind.

No one has ever publicly identified the father of Celina’s baby. Her family said she had mentioned a 16-year-old boy but never gave a name; investigators have never established whether she gave birth or what became of her child.

Nearly 30 years later, Celina has never been found. Willingboro Police and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children still treat it as an open endangered-missing-person investigation, and authorities have said they remain hopeful that both Celina and her child could be alive.