Mystery on the Rocks

This week, we decide to educate ourselves on something which didn't really get taught to us at school or, we feel, get adequately explained to us as children... Irish history.

Specifically, the story of one man - Michael Collins.

A firebrand revolutionary, his story cannot be understated when it comes to the formation of the republic of Ireland. After ruffling so many belligerent, colonial feathers it should have come as no surprise that people would want him out of the way. But no official record exists of how he met his end in a violent shootout.

So just who did assassinate him in 1922?

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On September 16th 1920, an attack on Wall Street killed 30 people instantly, 10 more in the aftermath and injured hundreds more. Yet it remains unsolved, despite arrests being made, trials being held and executions being conducted in a story which went on to grip the world.

Might the attack have its roots in an armed robbery on a shoe factory months earlier? We try to piece it all together as we learn about Italian anarchism in early 20th Century America and get sidetracked by late 1980s kids' cartoon The Shoe People...

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Following the Great War, in the early 1920s celebrated military strategist Earl Hancock Ellis worked tirelessly on a secret project - a project which would eventually lead him on a secret mission to Japanese islands in the Central Pacific.

A project which could well have predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor almost 20 years before it actually happened...

Join us as we discuss Ellis's predictions and high-stakes mission as well as, among other things, nits.

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Following last week's encounter with the nefarious Sir Basil Zaharoff, we rewind to the 1880s when machine gun inventor William Cantelo vanishes completely upon completing the prototype machine gun he had been working on for some time. Not long afterwards, Hiram Maxim unveils his outstanding Maxim gun, only for William Cantelo's surviving sons to be shocked by two things...

1) The gun is the exact same design as their father's and 2) Hiram Maxim bears a startling physical resemblance to their missing dad...

Could the villainous ZedZed have been involved somehow?

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Sir Basil Zaharoff. One of the most evil men who ever lived. Bigamist, fraudster, international arms dealer. Codename: ZedZed. A real nasty piece of work.

Most likely the real-life template for the James Bond supervillain, Zaharoff's influence on the geopolitics of the 20th Century cannot be overestimated, yet he lived in the shadows and his name doesn't loom over history as much as the man himself did. So why does nobody really know when and where he was born, why did he burn all records of himself and could he really be responsible for World War I?

And is a previous mystery on the show solved in the process?

Let's find out together!

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Season Five continues with one of the great 20th Century mysteries; did Princess Anastasia Romanov survive the Bolshevik revolution and execution of her family and go on to live a long life in secret?

Several people have indeed claimed to be the princess throughout the years and a potentially sticky diplomatic situation on the eve of peace with Germany during World War 1 helped to stoke speculation but did she really get away?

And is the Dreamworks film worth watching? We attempt to answer these in a very echoey room...

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Kicking off Season Five of Mystery on the Rocks (a kinda themed trawl through Geopolitics, War & Espionage of the 20th Century) is our 100th case... The Mad Monk Rasputin!

A mystic who inveigled his way into Russia's royal family's inner circle to become one of Tsar Nicholas' closest advisers, Rasputin is still held aloft as a totem of pure evil today - a reputation only enhanced by the terrifying stories told of his assassination in 1916. So, did Rasputin really possess powers magical enough to cure the Tsar's son of haemophilia as well as survive being poisoned, shot and drowned?

And do our three MOTR idiots end up becoming TYPICAL SNOWFLAKE RASPUTIN APOLOGISTS?

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It's our Season Four finale and we wanted to pick a doozy for it! So come with us to Florida in 2005 as we look at how a woman got out of a hotel she couldn't possibly have left without being seen and ended up 8 miles away and left for dead. What happened to her, who did it and just who on Earth is the Mercury Man and might he be the key to the whole affair?

This case is covered extensively in (so this episode owes a huge debt to) Mark Bowden's excellent Vanity Fair article The Case of the Vanishing Blonde so be sure to take a look after you've finished listening!

And we'll be back soon with Season Five!

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This week's episode, as voted for by our awesome supporters on Patreon in our monthly mystery vote, is the tale of John Lang who in 2016 was found dead in his burning home, stabbed three times after predicting his own murder in a series of posts on social media. He had uncovered corruption in the Fresno police department and documented all sorts of suspicious goings on as he became increasingly convinced they would make him pay.

So did they?

And is Masud secretly a bestselling novelist?

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