20 Best Unsolved Mysteries Episodes

"For every mystery, someone, somewhere knows the truth. Perhaps that someone is watching. Perhaps it's you."

This invitation from trenchcoat-clad "Unsolved Mysteries" host Robert Stack cast a spell on audiences for decades. An infamous, entrancing theme song and a dark, ominous setting for the openers helped, too. What started as a series of NBC TV specials in 1987 became a full-fledged series a year later. Stack presented four or more tales per episode, diving into unsolved murders, missing person cases, wanted criminals at large, conspiracy theories, hauntings, UFO sightings, unexplained phenomena, and even reuniting long-lost family members.

The landmark show by John Cosgrove and Terry Dunn Meurer, which moved channels several times, was later hosted by Dennis Farina, Raymond Burr, and Karl Malden. It was revived at Netflix (sans host) in 2020. It has profiled over 1,300 mysteries, and, thanks to tips from viewers, solved 260 of them, even exonerating seven wrongly accused people. It spawned a podcast and even a line of merch. Meurer told the L.A. Times that "the beauty of the franchise is that there's something for everyone."

However, some episodes stand out more than others, and through chilling re-enactments using local actors and even real people involved with the mystery itself, some are loaded with the best of everything for everyone. We present to you the best of the best: the 20 best "Unsolved Mysteries" episodes.

In this episode, Stack and Unsolved Mysteries shed new light on "one of the most baffling cases of this [the 20th] century." In 1971, a man who went by the alias Dan Cooper hijacked a plane and held its passengers for ransom at a Seattle airport. Once he received his demands—$200,000—he forced the plane to take off, then parachuted from the back and into infamy. FBI Agent Ralph Himmelsbach speculated that Cooper "may have lost his life," adding that "none of the money, not one bill has ever turned up in circulation." In 2016, the FBI closed the case.

The episode also delved into the unexplained deaths of Arkansas best friends Don Henry and Kevin Ives, which left their parents reeling for answers. The two teens reportedly smoked "20 marijuana cigarettes," laid motionless on a railroad track, and were killed when an approaching train couldn't stop. Their deaths were initially ruled suicides, but signs pointed to foul play. In 2018, a former wrestler came forward to admit he witnessed their murder, which came about over a drug money dispute.

Lastly, the episode touched on Dennis Walker, who became a big-time sports memorabilia collector with many investors aiding his pursuits. When authorities accused him of fraud, he packed up his assets and disappeared with them. Sixteen months later, Walker was found dead in Las Vegas. Most of his collection was never seen again, although his Babe Ruth uniform did resurface... only to go missing once more.

For a special 90-minute episode, Robert Stack held court at Alcatraz prison, which "stands in the middle of San Francisco's icy cold bay, a treacherous moat that was the best guarantee that nobody would successfully escape. And nobody did until June the 11th, 1962."

The show treated viewers to a brief overview of The Rock's history and some of its more notorious inhabitants, but attention quickly turned to escapes. Stack mentioned that 14 failed, "10 men died, and all the rest were captured, except three." The three men were Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin. Aided by tools and intel from other inmates, including previous escapee Clarence Carnes, the three masterminded the impossible. Over nine long months, they plotted, leaving dummy heads in their beds while they quietly dug out the rear of their cells. They eventually escaped from the roof and "saw the moon for the first time in decades." With prison-made rafts and life preservers in hand, they jumped into the 54-degree water and were free.

The following day, the manhunt was on, but the only items found were remnants of their raft and some personal effects. Most believe they died at sea, but the episode gave credence to tales and theories of them surviving. "Unsolved Mysteries" tried to replicate their two possible escape options, reaching shore on a similar makeshift raft, and then tapping "Escape from the Rock" triathlete Dave Horning to attempt the frigid swim. Their results showed it was possible.

Cindy Anderson was plagued by vivid dreams of being murdered. In reality, creepy personalized graffiti and frightening phone calls disturbed her. Shockingly, her worst nightmares may have come true, as she disappeared. Her body was never found and the case remains unresolved, but "authorities suspect Cindy was murdered after she overheard incriminating comments from a ring of drug traffickers."

Fifteen members of an always-punctual choir group all happened to be tardy for a night of practice on March 1, 1950. The excuses ran from homework to a stalled car to being glued to a radio broadcast. Luckily, all of these heavenly singers avoided the accidental explosion of the West End Baptist Church. Stack said, "to some, it was simply a remarkable coincidence, but others believe it was a careful design of a greater power." The Beatrice, Nebraska church has since been rebuilt, and the congregation continues to grow.

A student at Brandeis traded in her books to become a crook in 1970. Katherine Ann Power and some revolutionary associates robbed a bank, leaving a police officer dead upon their escape. Everyone was eventually apprehended except for her. After years on the lam, she surrendered to police in 1993 and served time. She now embraces peaceful activism.

In the final segment, three ATV riders in Tennessee turned up dead in what one authority called the "most brutal, uncalled-for murders ever." The 1988 case remained cold for almost a decade before Frank Casteel was caught and convicted. He eventually died in prison.

Teen Kari Lynn Nixon disappeared without a trace, but hope arrived in the form of a New Kids on the Block concert video, which appeared to have an audience member who looked like her. The New Kids themselves offered a plea, telling her or anyone else with information to come forward. The update at the end sadly confirmed it wasn't her: Kari Lynn Nixon was actually raped and murdered by Robert Anthony Jones, who eventually led authorities to her remains.

Most accept that aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan were lost at sea during their 1937 attempt to fly around the world. Some believe the two were actually captured by the Japanese, held as prisoners on Saipan, and then executed. When the U.S. military took control of the island in 1944, one soldier recalled seeing Earhart's plane in a hangar, which was then burned. Another soldier claimed to have found her papers in a safe. The show even tracked down an islander native who claimed to have seen her execution, which led to an excavation that recovered a blindfold. Stack closed the segment by saying that Earhart is "a hero suspended in time at the apex of an unsolved mystery."

The episode covered two other wanted cases. In the first, a jealous ex murdered his former girlfriend's parents and almost her and her brother, went on the run, found a job as a waiter, and ended up being caught by a detective whom he was serving. The other covered a large FBI sting operation of Colombian drug cartels in Florida. The op resulted in 93 indictments, but some perps are still on the run, including Jesus Penalver.

Robert Stack introduced the 1947 murder of actress/prostitute Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, as "one of the most celebrated murder investigations in American history." Her body was sexually mutilated, severed in half, gutted, and drained of blood. Some theorize that Short's killer was the Cleveland torso murderer (covered in Episode 19 of Season 3). When the killings in Cleveland stopped, they started up in Los Angeles, with a similar M.O. While Cleveland PD investigator Eliot Ness had a suspect in mind for the torso slayer, that killer and the Dahlia's remain unknown.

Sixteen-year-old Brenda Merrill was left in charge of her siblings while her mother went off to earn a living. Eventually, Brenda and her brothers and sisters were all separated from one another and sent to live with foster families. Thanks to the show, Brenda and two of her siblings were able to reunite with the others they hadn't seen in 30 years in "the best Christmas gift."

Seth Bullock was a lawman who brought order to Deadwood, South Dakota. He founded his own hotel in 1895 and later haunted its halls. He also apparently warned English psychic Sandy Bullock (no relation) of upcoming trouble in modern-day Deadwood. Robert Stack left it as a wait-and-see possibility. We're still waiting.

In the final segment, Dede Rosenthal went missing, with one barkeep claiming she twice saw someone who resembled her. Alas, it was not her, as Rosenthal was murdered by the maintenance man of her apartment building, Charles Reddish. Her body was never found.

Frank Hansen came into possession of a sideshow attraction that left ticket buyers and scientists both curious and baffled: a half-man, half-ape–like creature encased in a block of ice. Known as the Minnesota Iceman, Hansen toured his oddity around the country at carnivals and state fairs. When police became curious if it was actually a cadaver, he swapped it out with a replica. The whereabouts of the Iceman were unknown at the time of taping, but it has found a new home at Austin, Texas' Museum of the Weird.

Tom and Brendan Vaughn (no relation) were once inseparable, growing up together at a Catholic children's home... until they went off to live with new families. Tom had been looking for Brendan ever since, and thanks to the show, the pair were reunited.

The CIA has had a checkered past of abuse and experimentation. In the case of germ warfare scientist Frank Olson, the agency dosed him with LSD without his knowledge. Ten days later, he reportedly committed suicide by jumping out of a New York City hotel window. The Olson family didn't buy the explanation and suspected foul play to keep their father from exposing greater truths. This story was later explored at great length in Errol Morris' 2017 docuseries "Wormwood."

Abusive husband Larry Donald George, who killed two of his neighbors and paralyzed his wife, was finally caught thanks to viewers. He is currently on death row in Alabama.

The Circleville Letters were sharply penned threats that began in 1976. They led to one person's murder, and almost another's by a booby-trapped gun. The would-be victim's former brother-in-law was sent to prison for the crimes. The writer's poisonous pen even tried to dissuade the "Unsolved Mysteries" from doing a story, to which Robert Stack said, "It's not often we became a part of a story we're investigating, but in this case it didn't come as a total surprise."

In a case that seems torn right out of an Agatha Christie novel, Agatha Christie herself once went missing for 11 days for reasons fully unknown. This sent the media into a tizzy. Was she despondent from her mother's death or her husband's infidelity? Was it simply amnesia? Christie never explained the incident, not even in her autobiography. The segment featured a brief appearance by Academy Award nominee Jack "Artful Dodger" Wild.

The death of college student Tommy Burkett was ruled a suicide, but his parents wouldn't accept such a conclusion, particularly given its questionable circumstances. Tom and Beth Burkett came to their own conclusion that he may have been a DEA informant involved in something way over his head.

The legend of five chests of gold, apparently a gift to the Confederacy from Napoleon Bonaparte III, has caused numerous fortune-seekers to dig deep near Poverty Island, Michigan. All have come up empty-handed.

This episode celebrated their 200th mystery solved (the reunion of two Vietnam veterans, Mitchell Shigemoto and James Pearson), and was so juicy it was later the inspiration of a special "Drunk Mystery" episode of "Drunk History."

This episode was a special report from Oklahoma City, 10 months after the terrorist bombing of Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. Robert Stack recounted "a scene of cruel tragedy and remarkable heroism." Duane Miller survived the attack and was saved by two men whom he never got to thank. "Unsolved Mysteries" tried to help, but Miller passed away in 2011 without them stepping forward.

"Unsolved" team member Keely Shaye Smith (the future Mrs. Pierce Brosnan) followed up on Michelle Neal-Arkin's search for her birth mother, who happened to live only 10 miles from her. She was not only reunited with her mother but also her long-lost siblings.

After robbing a grocery store, the thieves killed a police officer and later escaped from jail. Thanks to a tip, Sam Wodke was recaptured and eventually died in jail. His partner, Rusty Corvette, was shot dead three months after being paroled.

Next is the controversial suicide of Bill Clinton's friend and White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster. He was found in a park dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Four days later, an unsigned suicide note surfaced that handwriting experts claimed was a forgery. Foster was a central figure in the Whitewater scandal, and his death reeked of foul play to some.

Writer James Ellroy explained how the rape and murder of his mother Jean in 1958 was the "moment" of his true birth, "because it's the genesis of [his] detectives' obsessions with the murders that they ultimately become consumed by" in his best-selling novels. Ellroy reexamined the case files and hoped someone knew of a blonde woman who was seen with his mother and the "swarthy man" on the night in question.

Two masked men robbed and terrorized Becky Wood. They seemed to know an awful lot about their victim, her possessions, and her home. Turns out Ted Noble had worked for the Woods years prior. He and his brother Gary became the suspects when stolen jewelry turned up at a pawn shop. The brothers went on the run but were eventually captured.

Steve Newton was a new father who was left drowning after a motorcycle crash. A good Samaritan saved his life but left before they could be identified. Luckily, "Unsolved Mysteries" closed the case on this one: his rescuer was Tammy Dotson, who, when meeting Newton, said she had "never been called angel before — far from it."

After her father's passing, Virginia Burns learned that he was previously married and had another daughter, but never saw them again. Burns took up the search herself and "Unsolved Mysteries" helped connect her with her half-sister, Susan King.

In tackling cases of spontaneous human combustion, "Unsolved Mysteries" brought great conflagration to several tales: Kay Y. Fletcher and the smoke that billowed from her back, George Mott being reduced to ashes in bed, and Dr. John Irving Bentley befalling a similar fate in his bathroom, even burning a hole through the floor.

When Tupac Shakur was gunned down (a death that was foreshadowed in a music video) on the Las Vegas strip in 1996, everyone wanted to know the identity of the murderer and their motive. Since the killer remains unknown (one eyewitness was later murdered), "Unsolved Mysteries" examined the possible motives, including a fight in a casino or West Coast vs. East Coast beef with fellow rapper Biggie Smalls. 

"Unsolved Mysteries" never had a problem traveling far and wide to cover any topic. In the Netflix series, with a wider, more international audience, they went abroad for the first time. The "House of Terror" episode took us on a trip to Nantes, France, where the fate of the picture-perfect Dupont de Ligonnès family shocked family, friends, a community, and then the whole world. 

In 2011, the Dupont de Ligonnès family, including three sons and a daughter, vanished from their home. Soon, their friends received an ominous letter saying they'd been recruited to work for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and not to worry about their whereabouts and well-being. Numerous police welfare checks of the home later revealed the buried bodies of all the family members except that of the patriarch, Xavier Pierre Marie Dupont de Ligonnès. Due to the delay of the discovery, Xavier had a head start on fleeing, but wasn't exactly discreet about doing so. He finally left his car behind at a hotel in the south of France and walked away from the parking lot never to be seen again (although there have been many claims of sightings since).

If you have tips on any of the cases discussed above, please contact Unsolved Mysteries.