AVQ&A: What unsolved mystery haunts you?

When I was little, I got my hands on The Mary Celeste: An Unsolved Mystery From History. It’s an illustrated children’s book about the discovery of the empty vessel of the Mary Celeste, all of its crew and passengers mysteriously disappeared. I was a big Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes kid, so I found the book’s design (like a detective’s case file) really appealing. The story has always stuck with me, maybe because it set sail on my birthday (November 7—we’ve just passed the 152nd anniversary) but mostly because it baffled me that those people could be lost entirely without a trace, with few clues to indicate what became of them; there wasn’t really evidence of foul play or natural disaster to explain the disappearance. The image of that ghostly ship floating undisturbed on open water has stayed with me for decades. [Mary Kate Carr]

The colder a case gets, the more likely I am to obsess over it. Bennington student Paula Jean Welden vanished from her college town nearly 78 years ago, and the intervening years have yielded very little information as to how or why. There are theories: Some chalked it up to the “cursed ground” she chose to hike on a cold December day in 1946, an area dubbed the “Bennington Triangle” after multiple people disappeared from it. Welden’s father came under suspicion at one point as well. But almost eight decades later, there’s no resolution. Her disappearance captured the attention of the nation, and the imagination of writers like Donna Tartt and Shirley Jackson. It was hardly the last time that a missing young white woman would dominate media coverage, but I guess my tenuous connection to Welden is what has made this one stick to me: We share a birthday. [Danette Chavez]

The Hinterkaifeck murders are the definition of a cold case considering they happened over a century ago. The tragic crime has been a global fascination for years—and it’s only gotten more attention with the rise of true crime. I’ve explored podcast episodes, documentaries, and Reddit threads about it. In 1922, a family of six was gutted in their farmstead on the outskirts of Munich, with the killer living with the bodies for three days after. The details are bone-chilling, from how a maid left six months prior believing a ghost’s presence in the house to the patriarch discovering someone might be hiding out in the attic. The Gruber clan was also believed to be potentially incestuous. There were multiple suspects, and the investigation was hampered by how many townsfolk were on the premises. No one was ever arrested and it’s safe to say no one will be, making the Hinterkaifeck Murders one of the spookiest unsolved mysteries. [Saloni Gajjar]

In March of 1990, two thieves stole 13 pieces of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The pieces were worth hundreds of millions of dollars, making it the largest art theft in history. And yet, the crime seems to have been carried out by buffoons. Paintings were taken off the walls but left propped up nearby; screws were loosened from display cases before the thieves simply gave up and moved on, possibly deeming the security measures too difficult to subvert. But the most egregious thing they did, the thing that has made this theft so infamous, is the way the thieves used a knife to roughly cut several paintings from their frames. If greed was the motivating factor for the heist, wouldn’t they want to preserve the value of the art? And if greed wasn’t the motivating factor, then what was? Nearly 35 years later, we still don’t have any answers. [Jen Lennon]