Mystery Bytes Archive

The highest paid spy in American history managed to pass polygraphs and keep under the radar, even though the CIA suspected an in-house mole. He lied, repeatedly, with an absolutely icy calm. Aldrich “Rick” Ames became wealthy selling secrets to the Soviet Union from 1985 to...

“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Just what was Ernest Hemingway trying to tell us, or to get us to think about? Legend has it that a $10 wager with fellow writers resulted in this poignant short story by Ernest Hemingway. Is there proof? No… but that just adds to the...

We have an air-traffic control system because no individual pilot can be expected to see the whole picture--air traffic in the area, the flow of ground traffic at an airport. The Tower, as it's called, serves as the central, coordinating eyes and ears of the flying world.But,...

After the brutal, infamous white colonial regime of South Africa gave way in 1994 to a government run by African hero Nelson Mandela, the new president asked for Truth and Reconciliation, even having a commission established under that name. The idea: get the...

Edward Snowden is someone most of us have heard of, but think about little if at all. Name sounds familiar. Isn't he the guy in hot water with the government, we ask, for exposing lots of classified information? Yes, that's him. He's the one who made sure the U.S....

The best estimates are that some 20 million Coptic Christians live in Egypt, with another million or more beyond the country's borders. Obviously a minority in a very Muslim world, they're significant nonetheless, and they've been there forever. So when a bishop is...

Since there have been trains, there have been dogs, from time to time, that wait for them. Not for the thrill of seeing the train but for someone, a special someone in the dog's world, to decamp. Comes the newest story from India, a dog waiting night after night at...

Silly video clips have exploded in number the last twenty years, and most are really not bothering with. Occasionally though, there's one you want to watch and then watch again, scratching your head. Speaking of exploding, that's what the surface of a lake does when...

Some instinct tells us that this story conceals a few interesting layers, if one started pealing them away. It's not that unusual, really, for a criminal to get his life so tangled up that suicide starts to look like an option. But this guy had an amazing history....

Not far from the world headquarters of Mind Over Mystery, a man runs for the Arizona State Senate. A routine thing, until it's revealed that he once shot someone to death--in fact it was his mother! He was eighteen. Whoa! "Bobby Wilson Confesses He Murdered His Mother and...

A kind of standard article, really, one we've seen a hundred times, a thousand times, before. A white-collar worker has enough responsibility in their job that they have business credit cards and wise latitude on how to use them. And use them they do--perhaps spas,...

Aaron Feis acted with extraordinary heroism. He draped himself over students as a school shooter went on a rampage. Although fourteen kids died at Parkland, the number would have been higher without the selfless acts of Coach Feis. The question is why? Why him, why...

It was stunning television in all senses of the word, the on-air suicide of WXLT-TV reporter Christine Chubbuck in Sarasota, Florida in 1974. Just as a stand-alone event, such a dramatic suicide by a lovely young woman, it's always captured the public imagination....

Back in the 1970's at the Watergate hearings in Congress, the mantra became the question: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" Central was the question of what the highest authorities knew, and failed to correct. A similar refrain can be heard in the sombre...

"No one had apparently been killed by Betty Miller's activities at the bucolic Wake Robin retirement home in Shelburne, Vermont, which advertises a population of "vibrant, engaged people and a community in which you can be yourself."" How often does the press on one side of the...

Jamie Leigh Jones sounds like the name of an A-List actress. Instead she was a girl with no particular name or fame, until events in Iraq thrust her into the spotlight. She's a tragic figure whether you believe every word she's ever said, or almost no word she's ever said....

Our recent MysteryByte introduced the long-running debate about the death of Army Private LaVena Johnson, was it murder or suicide? That's all part of a larger question, and a problem, perhaps a scandal, with rape in the military. Former Colonel Ann Wright says that if the...

That's the challenge for Hollywood. A real, major criminal investigation grinds away with more dull moments than the worst high school class you can remember. Agents and clerks of all stripes pour over old phone records, or old bank statements, or some form of ancient paperwork...

LaVena Johnson was a soldier who had just completed basic training, and had began settling into duty in Iraq. The army says she shot herself with her own rifle the night of July 19, 2005. She was known to be a bright and spirited girl, so there was nothing to suggest that she...

He feels "relieved" to be arrested now, in fact, to “finally be free from the mental torment” of knowing the day might come. He doesn't dispute, after all, that he killed four people years ago, for nothing more than the worth of their measly possessions. He's always known those...

November, 2017. It's been over a year now since Sherri Papini, an athletic and beautiful mother of two small children, disappeared like a wisp of California fog on a jogging trail near her home in Mountain View. The photogenic blue-eyed blond made national news--would that have...

In U.S. culture, an occasional comedy will hit the movie screens where someone plays the role of husband at a family reunion, or pretends to be a long, lost father. But we understand it for the over-the-top comedy that it is. We have no such fake experience of the sort in our...

By now everyone not living in a cave has heard of Bitcoin, the alternative currency born and residing in cyberspace. How do you trust money which has no existence anywhere, except the world of x's and o's? But how do you trust any money...after all, a piece of stiff green paper...

We know so much more about sports performance, both mechanically and even psychologically, than we did a generation ago. But like uncharted oceans, the depths of performance hold secrets we still don't fully grasp. What enables an athlete to be "in the zone," playing to their...

She had only been abroad in a small town in central Italy, for a few months, as a foreign student. The babble spoken all around her was just starting to sound like something intelligible, Italian. In fact she'd started a comfortable romance with an Italian guy, and life was...

There's a vague fascination with people who go hermit. "Does anyone ever actually see that old man? Well, I heard....." The fascination kicks up a notch when the hermit is famous. And when the recluse lived on the edge of mystery already, let's say writing literature open to...

It seems that nowadays, sexual harassment charges follow you almost to the grave. Rolf Harris, the retired Australian and British media personality and man who'll be ninety years old in a couple of years, still fends them off in court. The most recent charges against him,...

Every defense lawyer has preached it forever: if I'm going to defend you, put on a nice suit and look sharp. How you look to the jury is half the battle. It's another story of how the psychology of criminal justice looms at least as large as forensics, or principles of law......

She's realizes this is "pretty major," she says, and that in the past she's only had parking tickets. "I'm so embarrassed," she confides to the investigating officer. But she isn't referring to lifting a piece of jewelry from Macy's. She's admitting to being a serial killer,...

No question, it was the embarrassment of the season for the military, as the destroyer USS Fitzgerald crashed into a huge freighter in waters off Japan on June 17th of 2017. Astoundingly, August offered a similar collision for the USS John McCain, as history plays its endless...

They lay in wait, guns loaded. And when their parents came to relax in the family den that night in August of 1989, they simply blew them away in cold blood. It was the most infamous parricide since Lizzy Borden, although acquitted, likely chopped up two parents as if they were...

At times even a brief, almost trivial human interest story nonetheless reminds us of the depths to be plumbed when it comes to the human psyche, and the twists it's capable of. In the small town of Murphy, North Carolina, an obituary for an elderly lady, June...

Dramatic acts of political and social terror stagger the imaginations of most of us, normal persons not disposed to take out our frustrations by randomly killing people, including children, that we don’t even know. We at MOM intend to explore the rare and raw psychology of...

Aaron Hernandez's apparent suicide in prison - just days after the former NFL star was cleared of additional murder charges - remains shrouded in mystery. Why now? Is there more to the story? What happens to his estate? We won’t recount the full saga of the...

Two unlucky yachtsmen were attacked by a man-eating crocodile as they went ashore in search of a fresh water spring and became stranded for seven days, a Londoner told police. It seemed more than eerie after a sharp-eyed pilot spotted the universal SOS sign,...

One of the blessings, or curses, of mystery studies is that every intriguing case suggests dozens of subtle questions, and can send you down the path of some new, complex studies. Suicide, a depressing subject, stands as a field of its own--organizations like the American...