A landlady in Florida found the doorknob too hot to hold. Inside, a 67-year-old woman had been reduced to ash in an armchair, while the room around her was barely touched. The police chief wrote to J. Edgar Hoover for help.

Two hikers thought they had found a dead climber. Ten years later a radiologist noticed a flint arrowhead under the shoulder blade, and the oldest murder investigation in the world began.

He left his blood, his fingerprints, his clothes and his shoes behind, then spent hours inside the house before walking out into the last morning of the century. Japan has been looking for him ever since.

Federal and state agents searched his Georgia clinic on 16 June 2015. Three days later the autism physician was found dead in a North Carolina river, and the sheriff ruled it a suicide. His family never accepted that, and a much larger conspiracy story grew out of the case, one that investigators and fact checkers later took apart.

Diaa al-Awady told millions of followers that food could replace medicine. Egypt revoked his licence and closed his clinics. In April 2026 he was found dead in a Dubai hotel room, and the official answer that followed convinced almost none of the people who had believed in him.

In February 1959, nine experienced Soviet hikers slashed open their tent from the inside and fled, half-dressed, into a night of lethal cold. More than sixty years later, science has an answer - but not everyone believes it.

A haunting elevator video, a body found in a rooftop water tank, and an official ruling of accidental drowning. The coroner's file is closed; the questions about the Cecil Hotel never were.

In 1922, six people were killed on a remote Bavarian farm — days after the farmer found footprints in the snow leading to his house but never away from it. A century later, Germany's most haunting cold case is still open in all but name.

In 1966, two Brazilian technicians were found dead on a hill near Rio de Janeiro, wearing suits, raincoats and lead masks over their eyes — beside a note about capsules and a signal that never came.

In February 1978, five friends left a college basketball game in California and were found months later, 110 kilometres off course on a frozen mountain. One of the Yuba County 5 had survived for weeks inside a shelter stocked with food he never touched, and a sixth question has haunted the case ever since: what became of Gary Mathias?

In 1994, nurses and doctors at a California hospital collapsed one after another while treating a dying woman. Three decades later, science still cannot fully explain what happened that night.

On a June night in 1912, an entire household in a small Iowa town was killed while sleeping. More than a century, two trials and countless theories later, no one has ever been convicted.