Global True Crime

On the 6th of July 1985, a 19-year-old dance instructor and university student disappeared from a dance academy on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. It was the middle of the afternoon in a busy area, and whatever happened appears to have unfolded within a window of just 15 minutes. Her car was still in the parking lot. Her purse and keys had been left inside the building. And Diane Suzuki was gone. It is a case that has haunted Hawaii for more than 40 years, and to this day, it remains unsolved.

On Easter Sunday in 1990, a couple were out driving when a van came speeding up behind them. The van passed them, but a few minutes later they saw the same van parked outside an abandoned school. Standing beside it was a man holding a bloodstained piece of fabric. They kept driving, confused by what they had just seen. And shortly afterwards, the van appeared behind them again. This was not a scene from a horror movie. But years later, it would bear a striking resemblance to one.

In May 2008, 19-year-old Brandon Swanson spent an evening celebrating the end of the college year with friends in southwestern Minnesota. Sometime after midnight, his car became stuck on a gravel road during the drive home, and he called his parents for help. But despite staying in contact by phone, they could not find him. Brandon eventually left the car behind and began walking towards what he believed were the lights of a nearby town, while continuing to speak to his father. Then, without warning, he said two words: “Oh shit.” The call ended, and Brandon was never seen or heard from again. More than 18 years later, it is still unclear exactly what happened that night.

In early May 2014, Russell and Shirley Dermond were supposed to attend a Kentucky Derby party at a neighbor’s house. They lived in Great Waters, a lakeside community in Georgia where many people had moved to enjoy a quieter life in retirement. But Russell and Shirley never showed up. At first, that might not have seemed too strange. They were elderly. One of them could have been unwell, or maybe their plans had simply changed. But then the days passed. No one could reach them. And when a few friends eventually went to their home by Lake Oconee to check on them, they found something that would become the beginning of one of Georgia’s strangest unsolved murder cases.

John DeMars was a 30-year-old husband and father of two living in Nutley, New Jersey. He worked in banking in Manhattan and made the same commute to and from work almost every day. But on Friday, the 20th of December 1974, John left his office and never made it home. Somewhere along his usual journey back to New Jersey, he seemed to simply disappear. As the days turned into weeks and investigators ran out of leads, John’s family eventually turned to an unlikely source for answers: a local psychic. At first, the images and clues she described seemed strange and almost impossible to make sense of. But when the case finally took an unexpected turn, a remarkable number of those clues appeared to fall into place.

One evening in September 2006, 22-year-old Brian Barrett finished his shift at work, got into his pickup truck in the parking lot outside his workplace, and was shot. At first, there was no obvious motive. No clear enemies. No apparent conflict that could explain why anyone would want to kill him. But when police began looking more closely at Brian’s contacts, and especially at his life online, an entirely different story emerged. A story about a man who lied about who he was. About a young woman online who called herself Jessi. About love, jealousy and humiliation. And about how a digital relationship, built on lies from beginning to end, ultimately led to the murder of Brian Barrett.

One December night, in a remote corner of Ireland, a woman was brutally murdered on the road outside her holiday home. There were many suspects, but very few clear motives. Who would have wanted to kill this charming French woman? The residents of the nearby village were deeply unsettled. They had always felt safe there. Could one of them, one of their own neighbours, really have been capable of murder? Thirty years later, the same question remains. Do we now know who the killer was, or are there even more unanswered questions surrounding that night than anyone first realised?

On the 9th of December 1988, 40-year-old Hollywood cameraman Robert “Bob” Samuels was found murdered inside his home in Northridge, California. He and his wife, Mary Ellen, had been separated for more than two years, but their divorce had never been finalised. After Bob’s death, Mary Ellen received hundreds of thousands of dollars through life insurance and other assets, and she quickly began spending the money on clothes, expensive cars and luxury trips. But as investigators looked more closely at Bob’s murder, they began to uncover something far darker. And before long, it would become clear that Bob was not the only person standing in the way of Mary Ellen’s new life.