Not in My Back Yard
by Scott Hardie on May 11, 2007
I love Unsolved Mysteries. The show told such interesting stories in perfect bite-size pieces, and knew how to make the hair on your neck stand up. I wish they were more objective in their reporting and didn't rely on pseudoscience as evidence (using psychics to prove ghosts and polygraph results to condemn criminals), but damn they put on an entertaining show. The boxed sets for Strange Legends, Bizarre Murders, and Ghosts are all worth renting, though I confess I'm not as eager to delve into the Psychics and Miracles sets.
Anyway, I just finished the Bizarre Murders set, and one case was off-the-scale weird. The Austin police get an anonymous call that "[Mom] is dead, [Dad] killed her, her bones are in the yard." They go to the house, Dad is having a seizure and is taken to the hospital where he can't talk to the cops. The adult son lets them into the backyard and they find only animal bones like a cattle skull. When Dad can finally talk, he says Mom disappeared and oh yeah, he ought to file a missing persons report. Mom's coworkers said she had black eyes and missed a lot of work, but the cops can't verify abuse. A few weeks go by. The tipster calls again with the same message, telling the cops to look under the tires. They return and look there, and find a human skull and tiny bone fragments, just thumbnail-sized bits. Dad says "I don't know how those got there." The DNA tests show that they don't belong to Mom. The cops bring in archeology students from the local university to prowl the yard like a dig site. They check carefully under every blade of grass and put a red flag in the ground every time they find a bone fragment; soon the yard is a sea of red flags. They even find bone chips in the ashes in the grill. Dad insists he has no idea how they got there. DNA tests show that the bones belong to three different people, and none of them are Mom. The best the cops can figure is that an industrial wood chipper did this, since it's way beyond household blades like a lawnmower, and Dad doesn't have access to such a machine. Barring an identification of the bones, there's nothing the cops can do to Dad, so the mystery goes unsolved.
After the segment, the director commentary (recorded years later) deflated some of the mystery. It turned out that the DNA testing was faulty and all of the bones belonged to Mom after all. Dad was already in jail for assaulting his next girlfriend and shooting at a cop, and who knows whether he'd ever stand trial for Mom's murder or what difference it would make. Even with these answers, what a hell of a weird case.
Two Replies to Not in My Back Yard
Scott Hardie | May 11, 2007
It's in my queue now. UFOs not my favorite topic but I do look forward to seeing the set.
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
The Revised Revised Revised Story
Last spring, This Modern World ran a great parody charting the decline of civil liberties in recent years, after the then-shocking revelation that the government was building a database of every call made in the country: (link) I was reminded of that over the weekend as the latest shocking revelation came out, that the FBI has vastly abused its new ability to request confidential information in the interest of national security (link), almost as if it was the next panel in the strip. Except I'm not laughing. Oh, what I'd have given to be the reporter at Alberto Gonzales's press conference this morning. Go »Notes from Milwaukee So Far
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Thanks to a friend who couldn't use them, I scored They Might Be Giants tickets to replace the broken Valentines gift that I originally bought for Kelly. We took in the show last night with two other friends who happened to be going, Nathan and Raquel, and it was a great time. Most of my concerts have been metal, so I'm used to screaming and head-banging, and I didn't exactly know how to get into the music, especially since I was the least familiar with the TMBG catalog. Go »Eschew Obfuscation
For any FIN players wondering where in the hell the game is: I used my little free time over last weekend writing a mini-post – three whopping paragraphs – and at the end of the weekend I just couldn't bear to publish it so short. (The title of this post was the planned title of that post.) I have now rearranged my social so that weekends are more free, and one thing I plan to do with the time is resume writing FIN, starting this weekend by expanding my three paragraphs into more like three pages. Go »R.I.P. Mom
You were so still in your bed when I could finally sit down beside you, a few hours after the facility notified me that you had died. I hadn't seen you be that peaceful in years, your eyes not scanning the room for clues, your hands not turning over each object in front of you for endlessly repeated examination. I whispered to you the most urgent and most precious things I had to say, the secrets and atonements and wishes foremost on my mind. Go »
Denise Sawicki | May 11, 2007
What about the UFOs set? That is Darrell's favorite. He's not interested in any of the other ones, especially ghosts.