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Professional surfer, glamourous jewel thief, convicted murderer, reformed evangelist. Jack “Murf the Surf” Murphy’s life took on many forms. Yet, Murf the Surf was best known for his daring robbery of rare gems at the Natural Museum of History in New York City in 1964, which turned him into a folk hero. That was just a few years before he was convicted of beating, stabbing, and shooting a woman to death aboard a boat in Miami.

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During a 3-week period in October 2002, a team of snipers went on a killing spree in and around the Washington DC area. Bizarre clues were left at several crime scenes, including a tarot card with the words “Call Me God”, adding a chilling twist to an already twisted case. With 17 people already dead and almost a dozen more wounded, police were in a race against the clock to capture the DC sniper.

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In October 2002, residents of Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC became targets for a team of snipers. The two-person group was responsible for killing 17 people and injuring almost a dozen more. The kill team was well trained and stayed well hidden, making them incredibly difficult to locate or identify. Over several months, they terrorized millions of people and were the subject of one of the largest manhunts ever in the US.

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In July 1976, the small town of Chowchilla, California was rocked by the largest mass kidnapping in US history. A school bus carrying 26 students, along with its driver, was ambushed by a group of armed men. They were taken to a remote rock quarry and stripped down to their underwear. Each one was then ordered down a ladder into a container truck that had been buried 15 feet underground. They had no idea where they were, who had taken them, or why they had just been buried alive.

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When police in the UK received a panicked phone call from a teenage boy in the summer of 2003, it seemed fairly routine. His friend had been stabbed and was in need of medical attention. Authorities were told it was a random, unprovoked attack, but that could not have been farther from the truth. In fact, the attack had been meticulously planned for months. The perpetrator was so unexpected and the whole situation was so strange, authorities almost dismissed the case entirely. England had never seen a crime like this before.

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In March 1989, when a 21-year-old student from Texas went missing while on spring break in Mexico, it sparked a federal investigation on both sides of the border. The search led authorities down a bizarre and gruesome rabbit hole of mysticism and the occult that included everything from drug running to human sacrifice. It’s cases like this that make you want to sleep with the light on.

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When a man was found dead on a South Australia beach in 1948, it kicked off one of the most bizarre cases that country’s authorities had ever seen. With no identification and all the labels cut out of his clothing, police did find a torn piece of paper with two mysterious words. The words led to an unbreakable code in the back of the book. Had he committed suicide or was it murder? Why had no one come forward to identify him? That was just the beginning of what would become one of Australia’s strangest cold cases.

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They can be high-tech or unsophisticated, but either way, the purpose of a booby trap is the same, to surprise the target. In 2002, a retired engineer in Belgium thought he would surprise his estranged family with not one, but 19 hidden traps around his house. Each one was lethal and each one was cleverly disguised. Oh yeah, and to find them, you needed to crack a series of codes. In 2018, a man in the US created what authorities would dub the Indiana Jones house. It might have something to do with the massive hot tub turned on its side rigged to roll down the steep driveway. That was just the beginning!

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