10 Strange Unsolved Crimes

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:

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Do you know about the gold mine tycoon whose mysterious murder eventually pulled notable figures into its orbit? It’s just one of many strange unsolved crimes that I’m going to share with you today, from royal murders to brazen art heists to stolen cheese slicers. Let’s get started.

Harry Oaks was a millionaire who made his fortune striking gold in Canada in the late 1920s. He moved to the tax-free haven of the Bahamas, and by 1940, he was one of the richest people in the world. His philanthropy even helped him become a baronet, known as Sir Harry Oaks. After his violent death in 1943, which included a fatal bludgeoning and an apparent attempt to set the body on fire, the police investigation was quickly taken over by the Governor of the Bahamas, Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor, and former King of the United Kingdom, who happened to be Oaks’s close friend.

Edward’s hand-picked investigators soon identified Oaks’s son-in-law, Alfred Demarini, as a prime suspect. They even claimed to have found a perfect fingerprint at the scene of the crime that matched Demarini. However, at trial, that evidence began to crumble under cross-examination. Defense attorney Godfrey Higgs went so far as to accuse one of Edward’s men, Captain James Barker, of planting the fingerprint. With little other evidence tying the defendant to the crime, the jury acquitted Demarini in less than two hours.

Demarini’s wife, Nancy, stood by his side throughout the investigation into her father’s murder. Shortly after the trial, the couple left the Bahamas, reportedly to stay in Cuba with their friend Ernest Hemingway. Some still think Demarini is the most likely culprit, as he and his wife stood to gain significantly from an inheritance after Oaks’s passing. However, alternate theories abound.

In his book “Who Killed Sir Harry Oaks?”, Marshall House points a finger at Miami mafioso Meyer Lansky, who was allegedly trying to build a casino in the Bahamas and faced opposition from Oaks. Some even thought the Duke of Windsor himself was involved in the murder. Demarini claimed that Oaks, Edward, and others, primarily Harold Christie, a powerful businessman and realtor in the Bahamas, were involved in a conspiracy to smuggle money out of the Commonwealth. In one version of events, Oaks was trying to pull out of the dirty business and alert the authorities just before his untimely demise. Others speculated that the money could have been making its way to Nazi Germany, a theory not entirely out of the realm of possibility given Edward’s long-standing ties to Hitler and his regime.

William Boyd, who wrote a fictionalized version of the case for his novel “Any Human Heart,” was convinced that Christie was responsible. Christie was staying at Oaks’s house the night of the murder and allegedly owed his host a lot of money. He was even reportedly seen that night in town, despite claiming to have slept through the crime at Oaks’s house. Whether due to royal meddling or an incompetent investigation, we’ll probably never know all the facts about this high-profile crime.

If you find a diamond-encrusted cheese slicer and return it to Amsterdam’s Cheese Museum, your reward will include the world’s largest commercially available fondue set. The platinum slicer was designed by jeweler Rodrigo Otasu for the cheese accessory outfit Basket Holland. It contained 220 small diamonds and was valued at $26,000 when it was stolen in 2015. Although the culprits were caught on security camera, they were never apprehended, and the slicer hasn’t been seen since.

When Isabella Stewart Gardner passed away, her will included a clause mandating that the fine art museum she founded in Boston had to remain exactly the same. In fact, if anything inside were permanently changed, the will stipulated that the entire collection should be auctioned off with the proceeds going to Harvard University. For more than 65 years, the museum granted her wish, and all 2,500 pieces in the collection remained in their exact places. However, on March 18, 1990, that changed dramatically. In less than 90 minutes, two thieves went through the grounds and stole 13 works of art by the likes of Édouard Manet, Johann Vermeer, Edgar Degas, and Rembrandt. You could call these artworks priceless, or you could say they’d be worth around half a billion dollars today, according to one estimate. There have been decades of theories and more podcasts and documentaries about the heist than you can count. The FBI reportedly identified suspects who are now deceased, but the art has never been recovered. To avoid having to auction off Gardner’s entire collection, the museum has chosen to display vacant frames where the artworks once hung.

Gilda Marini had some paintings stolen from her New York City apartment in October 1995, but they weren’t the most valuable items lost in the theft. Marini was a renowned musician, and the 1727 Davidoff Marini Stradivarius violin taken from her home was worth millions of dollars. In what could be considered a silver lining, Marini, who had been in the hospital, died just days after the theft, evidently unaware that her prized instrument had been pilfered. The violin has never been found.

If you were a murderer in 15th century Rome, the natural landscape of the city provided a handy means to dispose of evidence: the Tiber River. As local timber merchant Giorgio Skiavi put it at the time, he had seen more than a hundred bodies thrown into the river and never heard of anyone troubling themselves about them. That changed with the death of Giovanni Borgia, the favorite son of Rodrigo Borgia, aka Pope Alexander VI. If you think it’s a bit odd that a pope had children, well, Rodrigo wasn’t exactly a stickler for the rules. On the night of Giovanni’s disappearance, Skiavi, an innocent bystander, saw a body being thrown into the river. After a couple of days, with Giovanni’s disappearance causing a stir, Skiavi came forward with his account. The pope promptly ordered a search of the river, and Giovanni’s body was found riddled with stab wounds. He also had a coin purse on him with money inside, likely ruling out a financial motive for the crime.

Queen Isabella of Spain was supposedly one of many who believed Giovanni’s brother Cesare was behind the murder. The two Borgias had a long-simmering sibling rivalry, perhaps stoked by professional jealousy. Their other brother, Joffrey, might have had a motive as it was said that his wife, Sancha, was having an affair with Giovanni, and perhaps with Cesare too. Borgia family reunions were probably a bit complicated. Still, others point to a rival Italian family, the Orsini, as suspects. Killing Giovanni may have been a way of getting even after numerous inner-familial conflicts. Intriguingly, the pope’s investigation into his son’s death was abruptly cut off a few days after it started, leaving future generations to wonder why.

Centuries later, another powerful family was caught up in a sordid story with a tragic ending. Wilma Montesi was just 21 years old in 1953, the same year her body washed up on the shore just outside of Rome. Her death was ruled an accidental drowning by police, but questions soon started to swirl. A journalist named Silvano Muto eventually accused a local aristocrat, Marquess Hugo Montagna, of leading a narcotics and prostitution ring that had led to Montesi’s tragic death. Montagna was said to have ties to the country’s Christian Democracy party and to officials inside the Vatican. According to a 1954 issue of Time magazine, when he threatened to break his silence, Montagna seemed to indicate how many people he could implicate in unsavory behaviors, saying he might cause the end of the world. In the end, Montagna was acquitted of any wrongdoing, as was the police officer who had quickly wrapped up the initial investigation. Improbably, some in Italy found the explanation that the tragedy was once again deemed an accident.

When Lord Darnley, the king consort of Scotland, was killed in 1567, it would have been very hard to call it an accident. His assailants blew up the entire building he was staying in, and strangely, Darnley’s body was actually found outside the home. He was apparently killed by strangulation as he attempted to escape. Many sources have pointed the finger at Darnley’s wife, who was also his cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. The two had what seems to be a troubled relationship. The writer Walter Scott later described Darnley as remarkably tall and handsome, but he was also apparently lacking in wisdom and courage. The queen may have been angered by her husband’s habit of carousing and womanizing. She probably also didn’t appreciate his possible role in the murder of David Rizzio, her private secretary and confidant. Many think that James Hepburn, the fourth Earl of Bothwell, organized the attack, but it’s unknown whether Mary was complicit in the crime, and it’s difficult to pin it on Bothwell definitively. Explosions have a way of destroying useful evidence, after all. If Mary did have a role in the attack, it didn’t end well for her. She was soon kidnapped by Bothwell and forced, according to most accounts, into an unwanted marriage with him. In 1587, Mary had some further difficulties with a different cousin when Queen Elizabeth I of England had her beheaded.

You’re probably familiar with the story of the Zodiac Killer, who may or may not have been a California man named Gary Post. But what about the Monster of Florence? This serial killer, if it was indeed one person, was responsible for as many as 16 murders between 1974 and 1985, all in the hills near Florence, Italy. Each one of the victims was part of a couple, evidently engaged in what the writer Douglas Preston called a national pastime in Italy: having intimate moments in parked cars away from the prying eyes of family members, who Italians traditionally live with until they marry. That lured factor helped make the murders an irresistible subject for speculation in Florence. The grisly mutilations carried out by the Monster and the difficulty of honing in on a single suspect made it an enduring international story. You can read plenty about the Monster of Florence online, including a long piece in The Atlantic written by Preston, covering many of the investigation’s dead ends and suspicious missteps.

But I want to focus on one strange aspect of the saga. In 1981, crime correspondent Mario Spezzy started reporting on a murder he soon came to believe, like many, was just one in a series. Spezzy even came up with the name “Il Mostro di Firenze,” or the Monster of Florence, for the unknown killer, perhaps in reference to the Monster of Düsseldorf, a killer who had terrorized that German city decades earlier. Spezzy’s reporting on the case often brought him into conflict with authorities. On multiple occasions, men suspected of the murders were jailed, and each time, Spezzy argued that the police had the wrong man. Then, in 2006, Spezzy himself was arrested, initially due to suspected ties to the murders and eventually in relation to charges of obstruction. Spezzy spent more than three weeks in jail, including five days when he was prevented from talking to his lawyers. He believed it was retribution for the unflattering reporting he had given to some of the governmental figures involved in the investigation. A group of judges soon freed him, and when he was released from prison, Spezzy vowed that his days writing about the Monster were done. When asked about the case years later, Chief Inspector Mikhaile Giutare, who had locked horns with Spezzy on multiple occasions and who oddly enough also became a crime novelist, said the case will never truly be resolved. There are crimes that can never be properly investigated because certain powers will do anything to ensure cases do not go ahead.

In the year 2000, someone hacked Washington’s Naval Research Lab and gained access to the source code for software in charge of missile and satellite guidance. Don’t worry, though; according to authorities, the thief only made off with two-thirds of the code, and some reports say it was an older version of the software, severely limiting the damage they could do. Government officials tracked the crime to a computer on the campus of a university in Germany, but if they ever got any further in their search, that information hasn’t been made public. Though that story might not have been quite as dramatic as the nuclear launch codes hacked, it does point to the critical stakes around cybercrime and the potential it has to inflict massive damage on the world stage.

And then there’s the time in 2003 that CBSNews.com was hacked in an effort to help the 10th most popular candidate in the Democratic presidential primary that fall. As Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich languished in the polls, an intrepid Kucinich head hacked into CBS News’s website so that visitors would be greeted by the Kucinich campaign logo and a 30-minute video featuring the candidate called “This is the Moment.” It was apparently not the moment, as Kucinich dropped out of the race in July 2004.

Our next episode is all about UFOs. We’re not talking about green men with large heads, just verifiable information about the very real phenomenon of flying objects that are difficult or impossible to identify. If you’ve got a favorite fact about UFOs, drop it in the comments below. Thanks for watching!

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This version removes any potentially sensitive or inappropriate content while maintaining the essence of the original transcript.