scary stories and true crime

Terrifying Unsolved Murders in Every State pt.2 (M-W)

⚠️Warning that these accounts may be upsetting to some as they describe details of real-life cases.⚠️

MAINE: CATHY MOULTON
On Sept. 24, 1971, 16-year-old Moulton was preparing for a YMCA dance that evening and asked her parents if she could head into downtown Portland, Maine, to buy a new pair of tights. Her mother told her to also grab some toothpaste and to come home before the dance. Her father dropped her off, and after buying her items, Cathy met with a friend at a record shop then started her walk back home at about 5:30 p.m. She never made it to her house.

Portland Police were initially reluctant to help, wanting to wait the customary 72 hours for a missing person to show up, but father Lyman Moulton urged them to act quickly. He also sought out the local branch office of the FBI, where agents dismissed the disappearance as a teenage runaway case. A report came in that a girl matching Cathy's description was seen in a car with a boy in Portland on the night in question, but the lead was a dead end. The case was eventually closed although reopened in 1983 when a hunter in rural Maine found remains matching that of a teen girl in early 70s clothing. But when he led authorities to the site of his discovery, he couldn't find it again. A search of the area in 2004 yielded no results.

MARYLAND: CAROLYN WASILEWSKI
On the night of Nov. 8, 1954, 14-year-old Carolyn Wasilewski left her home in the Morrell Park neighborhood of Baltimore at 6:15 p.m., telling her parents that she was heading to a nearby trailer park to meet up with a friend and then on to Morrell Park Elementary School to sign up for a winter dance. Wasilewski, who also went by the name of Carolyn Wells, didn't reach the trailer park or the school. The next morning, a train engineer on the Baltimore to Harrisburg, Penn., express spotted a body on the tracks that ran underneath the bridge on Belvedere Avenue. It was Wasilewski, and according to postmortem tests, she'd died at about 11 p.m. from a skull fracture the night before. She wasn't killed on the train tracks but rather a vacant lot eight miles away, where police discovered some of her personal effects next to some blood. Her assailant then discarded Wasilewski's body on the tracks after the last trains of the night.

Baltimore Police questioned around 300 people and never made an arrest. One of their most promising and suspicious leads — 45-year-old Ralph Garrett. Spotted speaking to Wasilewski not long before her death, he hanged himself in a train car in a rail yard, which faced the field where the teenager was murdered. Still, Wasilewski's case sits unresolved in BPD files.

MASSACHUSETTS: LOUIS B. ALLYN
Louis B. Allyn, an alumnus and a chemistry professor of Massachusetts' Westfield State College, according to MassLive, changed the way Americans both think about food and eat. In the early 1900s, he wrote The Westfield Pure Food Book, a scientifically backed and thoroughly tested exposé on the toxins and impurities found in commonly produced and consumed food items. Along with Upton Sinclair's similar work, The Jungle, the book helped launch the pure food movement, leading to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the birth of stringent government regulation of what Americans eat. 

Naturally, this all made Allyn the enemy of industrialists and big food companies, which had to change the way they did business. He also reportedly angered the Nazis because he held a patent it wanted, and he testified against an organized crime syndicate. Any number of parties could have murdered Allyn, found shot to death in his home in May 1940, ironically while reading a book called The Gun. Allyn's is the oldest unsolved murder in modern Massachusetts and the only unsolved murder in Westfield.

MICHIGAN: A MAN FOUND BEAR TROUT LAKE
More than 50 years after his remains were recovered in the woods close to Trout Lake, authorities in Michigan are yet to uncover the identity of a man known to the state only as "John Doe," or case number 83-1352-05, as per NamUs. His body was found on Nov. 13, 1966, and testing suggests he died sometime in 1965 or 1966, that he was a white male about 5-feet 10-inches tall, and no older than 25.