ONTD Original: Building on Unsolved Mysteries
We all know Unsolved Mysteries was a show that brought light to many cases and put their victims in the spotlight in hopes of solving them.
Recently, with the influx of true crime documentaries, many Unsolved Mysteries segments have been expanded into multi-episode documentaries of their own. In this ONTD original series, your resident Unsolved Mysteries junkie goes to the way-back machine for some of my favorite segments from the 1980s classic Unsolved Mysteries.
Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman
source
This is one of my pet cases, partially because Lauria and Ashley were very close to my age and lived just a few hours from where I lived at the time.
Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman were best buds. Over the holidays in 1999, Lauria asked her parents if she could stay overnight with Ashley and her family to celebrate Ashley’s birthday. What could go wrong with a harmless birthday sleepover, right?
Overnight, the Freemans’ trailer caught fire and burned to the ground. Authorities initially only found the remains of the Freeman matriarch, Kathy, in the rubble. However, after a second glance (once the crime scene had been cleared by the OSBI), Lauria’s parents were looking through to see if they could find any of Lauria’s belongings and discovered the body of Danny Freeman, Ashley’s father. The girls were definitively not in the fire, however they did find Lauria’s purse with a few hundred dollars in it. Lauria’s car was also still in front of the Freeman residence.
Initially, the girls were suspected once it was determined that both of the Freeman parents were murdered by a shotgun blast to the head. However, how could two teen girls with no money and no car living in the backwoods of Oklahoma get anywhere and stay hidden for long?
FYI, there are a lot of parents that I feel for but I think Jay and Lorene Bible take the cake at absolutely breaking my heart. In one of his interviews, Jay declares that if they ever found the girls, he’d raise both of them as his own. Lorene put 200,000 miles on her car, driving all over Oklahoma, trying to find her daughter. These are the parents everyone should want to have - they never, ever, EVER gave up hope that they would find out what happened to their daughter and her best friend.
There has FINALLY been some resolution for Lauria’s poor parents in the past year. Two of the suspects in the murders are already deceased, and one was sentenced to 10 years in prison for accessory to murder. source
I’m not even going to detail what those poor girls went through. I’m just sad that it’s doubtful that their remains will ever be found.
Additional media:
Hell in the Heartland: What Happened to Ashley and Lauria?
Streaming on HBO Max
Disappeared: Out of the Ashes
Streaming on ID On Demand / Discovery +
source
Both of these were produced before the arrests, so there’s quite a bit of speculation in them. The four-part documentary really goes into the shady, shady people who were in that area of Oklahoma at the time, the drug scene that Danny Freeman was supposedly involved in, the intrigue with the sheriff's department and the death of Ashley's older brother, and the continued search for the girls, including all of the false confessions made by people over the years.
Michael Swango
source
We all want to believe that doctors are saints who always uphold the Hippocratic oath and would never willingly hurt us, right?
Well there’s always one. This Unsolved Mysteries segment focused on Michael Swango, a brazen white male doctor who managed to convince a lot of people to ignore the giant file of red flags on him so he could continue to provide health solutions for the public at large.
He’s accused of poisoning everyone from his patients to his co-workers with everything from ant poison and insecticides to insulin. When the walls closed in on him, he fled abroad and worked in hospitals in Africa.
Thankfully, he had to eventually renew his visa and Customs nabbed him as soon as he was back on American soil. He killed at least four people. It’s unknown how many people he truly killed. And they showed him zero mercy, and threw him in ADX Florence Supermax for 3 life terms. He’s in there with a bunch of Al-Qaeda guys, the Unabomber, the Boston bomber, the Atlanta bomber and El Chapo. Good riddance.
Additional media:
“Very Scary People: Dr. Death”
Streaming on HBO Max
source
Even though Donnie Wahlberg is cringe, I kinda like Very Scary People. The interviews they get are really good. They managed to find many of Swango’s former co-workers for his documentary.
D.B. Cooper
source
I mean, how much do I need to go into about this case? If you’re at all into true crime, you likely know all about this.
A man who gave his name as D.B. Cooper at an airline counter (ahhhhh the days before we had to surrender every piece of our known identities and send our shoes through a metal detector just to board an airplane) purchased a ticket from Portland to Seattle. He then proceeds to hijack the plane, demands $200,000 in cash (the equivalent of $1.2 million now) and four parachutes, lets everyone off except the crew and demands the plane fly from Seattle to Mexico City.
Somewhere over Oregon, he jumps out of the plane and is never seen again. Some of the bills were found in 1980 by a kid, but none of the rest of the money, nor any trace of D.B. Cooper has ever been found.
Additional media:
The Mystery of D.B. Cooper
Streaming on HBO Max
source
This doc goes down every rabbit hole to try to identify the only unsolved hijacking in commercial airline history.
Liz Carmichael and The Dale
source
BEFORE WE GET INTO THIS CASE, A REMINDER: This was a case featured in 1989. The understanding and acceptance of trans people was not always what it should be.
That being said, it was lovely seeing her male co-workers speak with her correct pronouns, even back then. There was also speculation that since she was on the run from the law, she was dressing as a woman not because she was trans, but because it was a disguise. But I digress.
This is one of the more interesting cases from UM, not necessarily because of the person, but because of the nature of the crime. Liz Carmichael worked at a company called Twentieth Century Motor Cars, a company that purported to have invented a three-wheeled car called The Dale, which could get 70 mpg.
(Don’t we all WISH?)
This was during a massive oil shortage in the US, so investors lept to invest in the car. However, after extensive investigation, they discovered that the car was a non-entity, and charged Liz with fraud, after which she fled from authorities. It’s quite interesting that even after it was exposed that her car could not do what she claimed, that the employees at the company still strongly believed that it could be salvageable, even, as it appeared, no one within the company knew how to, ahem, BUILD A CAR.
After they charged her with fraud and raided her home, authorities made a startling discovery: Liz Carmichael was technically male, and under her other identity Gerry Dean Michael, had another warrant out for her arrest.
Additional media:
“The Lady and the Dale”
Streaming on HBO Max
source
This was an interesting series. They interviewed many of Liz’s family members, former car company employees and other journalists regarding the Dale, the mystique surrounding Liz and her lifestyle, the trial and conviction and her post-jail life. It has a very distinct art style too that is very different from any documentary I’ve seen (outside of the fabulous Monty Python doc on Netflix).
HBO Max, between its own content and buying the CNN/HLN content, has a great treasure trove of true crime documentaries. What's your fav full length true crime doc?
Recently, with the influx of true crime documentaries, many Unsolved Mysteries segments have been expanded into multi-episode documentaries of their own. In this ONTD original series, your resident Unsolved Mysteries junkie goes to the way-back machine for some of my favorite segments from the 1980s classic Unsolved Mysteries.
Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman
Click to viewsource
This is one of my pet cases, partially because Lauria and Ashley were very close to my age and lived just a few hours from where I lived at the time.
Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman were best buds. Over the holidays in 1999, Lauria asked her parents if she could stay overnight with Ashley and her family to celebrate Ashley’s birthday. What could go wrong with a harmless birthday sleepover, right?
Overnight, the Freemans’ trailer caught fire and burned to the ground. Authorities initially only found the remains of the Freeman matriarch, Kathy, in the rubble. However, after a second glance (once the crime scene had been cleared by the OSBI), Lauria’s parents were looking through to see if they could find any of Lauria’s belongings and discovered the body of Danny Freeman, Ashley’s father. The girls were definitively not in the fire, however they did find Lauria’s purse with a few hundred dollars in it. Lauria’s car was also still in front of the Freeman residence.
Initially, the girls were suspected once it was determined that both of the Freeman parents were murdered by a shotgun blast to the head. However, how could two teen girls with no money and no car living in the backwoods of Oklahoma get anywhere and stay hidden for long?
FYI, there are a lot of parents that I feel for but I think Jay and Lorene Bible take the cake at absolutely breaking my heart. In one of his interviews, Jay declares that if they ever found the girls, he’d raise both of them as his own. Lorene put 200,000 miles on her car, driving all over Oklahoma, trying to find her daughter. These are the parents everyone should want to have - they never, ever, EVER gave up hope that they would find out what happened to their daughter and her best friend.
There has FINALLY been some resolution for Lauria’s poor parents in the past year. Two of the suspects in the murders are already deceased, and one was sentenced to 10 years in prison for accessory to murder. source
I’m not even going to detail what those poor girls went through. I’m just sad that it’s doubtful that their remains will ever be found.
Additional media:
Hell in the Heartland: What Happened to Ashley and Lauria?
Streaming on HBO Max
Disappeared: Out of the Ashes
Streaming on ID On Demand / Discovery +
source
Both of these were produced before the arrests, so there’s quite a bit of speculation in them. The four-part documentary really goes into the shady, shady people who were in that area of Oklahoma at the time, the drug scene that Danny Freeman was supposedly involved in, the intrigue with the sheriff's department and the death of Ashley's older brother, and the continued search for the girls, including all of the false confessions made by people over the years.
Michael Swango
source
We all want to believe that doctors are saints who always uphold the Hippocratic oath and would never willingly hurt us, right?
Well there’s always one. This Unsolved Mysteries segment focused on Michael Swango, a brazen white male doctor who managed to convince a lot of people to ignore the giant file of red flags on him so he could continue to provide health solutions for the public at large.
He’s accused of poisoning everyone from his patients to his co-workers with everything from ant poison and insecticides to insulin. When the walls closed in on him, he fled abroad and worked in hospitals in Africa.
Thankfully, he had to eventually renew his visa and Customs nabbed him as soon as he was back on American soil. He killed at least four people. It’s unknown how many people he truly killed. And they showed him zero mercy, and threw him in ADX Florence Supermax for 3 life terms. He’s in there with a bunch of Al-Qaeda guys, the Unabomber, the Boston bomber, the Atlanta bomber and El Chapo. Good riddance.
Additional media:
“Very Scary People: Dr. Death”
Streaming on HBO Max
source
Even though Donnie Wahlberg is cringe, I kinda like Very Scary People. The interviews they get are really good. They managed to find many of Swango’s former co-workers for his documentary.
D.B. Cooper
source
I mean, how much do I need to go into about this case? If you’re at all into true crime, you likely know all about this.
A man who gave his name as D.B. Cooper at an airline counter (ahhhhh the days before we had to surrender every piece of our known identities and send our shoes through a metal detector just to board an airplane) purchased a ticket from Portland to Seattle. He then proceeds to hijack the plane, demands $200,000 in cash (the equivalent of $1.2 million now) and four parachutes, lets everyone off except the crew and demands the plane fly from Seattle to Mexico City.
Somewhere over Oregon, he jumps out of the plane and is never seen again. Some of the bills were found in 1980 by a kid, but none of the rest of the money, nor any trace of D.B. Cooper has ever been found.
Additional media:
The Mystery of D.B. Cooper
Streaming on HBO Max
source
This doc goes down every rabbit hole to try to identify the only unsolved hijacking in commercial airline history.
Liz Carmichael and The Dale
source
BEFORE WE GET INTO THIS CASE, A REMINDER: This was a case featured in 1989. The understanding and acceptance of trans people was not always what it should be.
That being said, it was lovely seeing her male co-workers speak with her correct pronouns, even back then. There was also speculation that since she was on the run from the law, she was dressing as a woman not because she was trans, but because it was a disguise. But I digress.
This is one of the more interesting cases from UM, not necessarily because of the person, but because of the nature of the crime. Liz Carmichael worked at a company called Twentieth Century Motor Cars, a company that purported to have invented a three-wheeled car called The Dale, which could get 70 mpg.
(Don’t we all WISH?)
This was during a massive oil shortage in the US, so investors lept to invest in the car. However, after extensive investigation, they discovered that the car was a non-entity, and charged Liz with fraud, after which she fled from authorities. It’s quite interesting that even after it was exposed that her car could not do what she claimed, that the employees at the company still strongly believed that it could be salvageable, even, as it appeared, no one within the company knew how to, ahem, BUILD A CAR.
After they charged her with fraud and raided her home, authorities made a startling discovery: Liz Carmichael was technically male, and under her other identity Gerry Dean Michael, had another warrant out for her arrest.
Additional media:
“The Lady and the Dale”
Streaming on HBO Max
source
This was an interesting series. They interviewed many of Liz’s family members, former car company employees and other journalists regarding the Dale, the mystique surrounding Liz and her lifestyle, the trial and conviction and her post-jail life. It has a very distinct art style too that is very different from any documentary I’ve seen (outside of the fabulous Monty Python doc on Netflix).
HBO Max, between its own content and buying the CNN/HLN content, has a great treasure trove of true crime documentaries. What's your fav full length true crime doc?