From shocking live broadcasts to unforgettable moments that left millions of viewers stunned, television has captured some of the most disturbing events ever aired. In this video, we count down five of the most disturbing moments in TV history—events that sparked controversy, fear, and lasting public discussion.
⚠️ This video is intended for educational and documentary purposes. It explores the historical context surrounding these broadcasts and does not glorify violence or tragedy.
If you enjoy history, mysterious events, and fascinating TV moments, don't forget to Like, Subscribe, and Turn on Notifications for more countdowns and documentaries.
#TVHistory #DisturbingMoments #TelevisionHistory #ShockingTV #HistoricalEvents #BroadcastHistory #Documentary #Top5 #Countdown #TrueStories #TVMoments #HistoryFacts #CreepyHistory #DarkHistory #Unbelievable #Educational #Mystery #ViralMoments #MediaHistory #FactVideo
⚠️ This video is intended for educational and documentary purposes. It explores the historical context surrounding these broadcasts and does not glorify violence or tragedy.
If you enjoy history, mysterious events, and fascinating TV moments, don't forget to Like, Subscribe, and Turn on Notifications for more countdowns and documentaries.
#TVHistory #DisturbingMoments #TelevisionHistory #ShockingTV #HistoricalEvents #BroadcastHistory #Documentary #Top5 #Countdown #TrueStories #TVMoments #HistoryFacts #CreepyHistory #DarkHistory #Unbelievable #Educational #Mystery #ViralMoments #MediaHistory #FactVideo
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TravelTranscript
00:00In the early hours of October 15th, 1980, a small staff at WCPO in Cincinnati was working through
00:06what should have been an ordinary night shift. By it, at around 2am, news reporter Elaine Green
00:12and a channel photographer were heading out to their cars when a man carrying a semi-automatic
00:16rifle stepped out from the dark and ordered them back inside. He assured them no one was going to
00:21get hurt and he just wanted to say something he needed the cameras for. The man was 41-year-old
00:26James Hoskins, an out-of-work artist living in Cincinnati's Over the Rhine neighborhood,
00:30which is one of the poorest areas in the city. Along with the rifle, he also had 5 handguns and
00:35roughly 600 rounds of ammunition. By the time the rest of the staff realized what was happening,
00:40James already had the entire newsroom under his control. He gathered all 9 employees at gunpoint
00:46and told Elaine he wanted to go live on television to deliver a message. Elaine, however, convinced
00:50him to record the interview on tape instead, preventing the station from airing an unpredictable
00:55hostage situation live to viewers at home. What no one at WCPO knew yet was that the most
01:01tragic part of the night had already happened hours earlier. When the camera finally started
01:05recording, James began explaining why he had come there in the first place, while holding
01:09a gun in his hand the entire time. He talked about the violence and poverty he witnessed every day
01:26from his apartment window in Over the Rhine. There's not enough attention paid for the poor
01:32people in the Over the Rhine area, and there seems to be in the country a growing kind of thing
01:36to keep
01:37black and white at each other's throats, to keep the rich on top, so the poor people have no way
01:42to
01:43fight. The police have become the knights, the buffer between the rich and the poor. And the poor knew,
01:49I don't know if you've ever been in the Over the Rhine area to see the old people. They have
01:52nothing.
01:52I watch them. They have nothing. They sit in their bed all day long, and that's all they have to
01:56look forward
01:57to. Nothing's happening for them. Nobody cares. Nobody does anything for them. He then turned that
02:02frustration toward the media and the city itself, accusing news stations of only entering these
02:07neighborhoods after someone had been killed, while city officials cleared low-income housing so
02:11visitors coming for conventions wouldn't have to see the poverty there. It seems like the things you
02:16should be covering, you don't cover. You don't, uh, you never come into the area unless somebody gets
02:22wasted. Uh, they're displacing people. They, uh, they tear the buildings down so that when the people
02:31come into the convention centers, they don't have to look at the poor people.
02:34By it, even as James laid all of this out, he kept speaking like a man who knew exactly how
02:39the night
02:39was going to end. Can you see this world from your window? I can see the world from my bay
02:45windows
02:46up and down the street. Possibly a story could be done from your window of your world you see. I
02:53won't
02:53be there in my windows after this, I'm sure. Maybe you can do it from my windows, but I won't
02:58be there.
03:00This only added to the seriousness of the interview. By it, for a man forcing people to listen at gunpoint
03:06and claiming that he was about to no longer be here, most of James' points didn't sound
03:10completely detached from reality. He was rambling and at times struggled to get his thoughts together.
03:15By it, his anger kept circling back to real problems and a system he believed had abandoned
03:20the people he was supposed to protect. This would go on for nearly 10 minutes. As the tape started
03:25running out, Elaine asked if there was any final point he wanted to make. And that's when James
03:30finally said what he actually wanted next. Jim, we have probably another minute or so
03:35on this tape. Is there any other point you wanted to make?
03:41I can't think of any point I want to make except give me a place where the police can come
03:46and get
03:46me and we're going to shoot it out. And you people can leave.
03:52Here?
03:54Well, I don't see any other place for me to shoot it out. They've got their magnums. They
03:59want to hurt the poor people in the street. I've got my magnums. I'm ready. I'm loaded.
04:07Hearing that, the people in the room tried to reason him out of his plan, pointing out that
04:11what he had just said sounded too idealistic to end in a shootout. By it, James' response to it
04:16immediately changed the context of the entire interview.
04:35Before coming to the station that night, James had shot his girlfriend, 30-year-old Melanie Finley.
04:41She was later found inside their shared apartment on 12th Street. This confession made his calmness
04:46even more disturbing, as it became clear that James wasn't using the cameras to fight a corrupt
04:50system. He was using them to explain something he believed could no longer be undone. And even
04:55after Elaine and others kept pleading that he could still get help, James insisted he was already
05:00past saving, blaming drugs, paranoia, and a plan he said had started long before that night.
05:06I have no choice. I've murdered my girlfriend. I've been taking this weird drug. I'm out of my
05:12mind. But you can get help. I can't. We planned. We did all these things. This whole thing was
05:17planned back in San Francisco. It was all started out. Over the period of time, I've become paranoid.
05:26I tell you, the drugs, the angel dust people turned me on the angel dust. They did numbers only in
05:31San
05:31Francisco that I became, I ran from one end of the place to the other. He was certain that he
05:37couldn't come back from what he had committed already. I know that I'm slipping away. Can't we
05:41help you? Before you slip in, you don't want to slip completely away. I'm gone. I'm gone. All they'll do,
05:48there is no help for me. Look, I murdered my girlfriend. God damn, man, I killed her.
05:59After roughly 90 minutes, James let all nine hostages leave unharmed and barricaded himself
06:04alone in the newsroom as police and SWAT surrounded the building. Negotiators spoke with him by phone
06:09through the morning, trying to talk him down. By it at 9.15am, while speaking to an officer on the
06:14phone, James said, Well, it's time. I'm going to do it now. Police waited another four hours before
06:20entering the building, fearing it might be a trap. When they finally went inside at 1.45pm,
06:25they found James on the newsroom floor with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And when investigators
06:30searched his apartment, they realized the interview at WCPO may have only been one part of a much
06:36darker plan. They found more weapons, bomb-making materials, and detailed files on prominent city
06:42figures filed under labels like political creeps, business creeps, and police tactics. Elaine Green later
06:48won a Peabody Award for her courage in the interview. Much of what James said that night
06:52still sounds like fair criticism even today. By it, the way in which he forced the world to hear it
06:58is what made the footage so disturbing.
07:04On Halloween night 1990, roughly 150 people gathered at Blackbeard's Family Fun Center in
07:10Fresno, California to watch a local magician attempt something no stuntman had ever survived.
07:1532-year-old Joseph Boras, or Amazing Joe, was a self-taught magician from Fresno who had spent
07:21years trying to surpass Harry Houdini and become the greatest escape artist ever. And on this night,
07:27the anniversary of Houdini's death, he wanted to prove it. His plan was to be handcuffed,
07:31wrapped in chains, locked inside a transparent plastic coffin, and be buried alive in a seven-foot
07:37grave, all recorded for TV. If everything went according to plan, he would escape in less than a
07:42minute. But the problem was that even Houdini himself had nearly died attempting a version
07:47of this stunt in 1915, when the pressure of dirt got so overwhelming that he lost consciousness and
07:52had to be pulled out by his assistants before he died of suffocation. Joe, however, had already
07:56survived a simpler version of the stunt a year before in Oregon, where he escaped from a wooden
08:01coffin buried under dirt. That success gave him the confidence to go bigger. So, for the Fresno
08:06performance, Joe added something even Houdini never used, wet concrete. But during the days
08:12leading up to the stunt, one small detail had already hinted that Joe may have been taking too
08:16big of a risk. Still, when Joe arrived on location in a white tuxedo and white shoes,
08:22he gave the crowd no reason to think the stunt was in doubt.
08:29In the crowd were members of his family, including his 13 and 10-year-old sons, which made it seem
08:34like
08:34Joe had everything under control. So, in front of everyone, he let his assistants handcuff him and
08:39wrap chains around him before sealing him inside the transparent plastic coffin. Once the lid was
08:45locked, the coffin was lowered into the 7-foot grave, and his assistants began shoveling dirt
08:49into the hole until there was about 3 feet worth. Then, a cement truck pulled in and poured about 3
08:54feet
08:55of wet concrete on top. The plan was for Joe to free himself before the wet cement fully dried up
09:00and trapped his escape route. But, as soon as the hole was filled to the edge, the dirt and concrete
09:05both suddenly dropped about 2 feet, as witnesses heard the coffin shatter somewhere beneath all that weight.
09:23The crowd that had been waiting for Joe to climb out now watched the crew rush back in and start
09:28digging through the same dirt and concrete they had just buried him under. Unfortunately, by the time
09:33rescuers pulled him from the ground, he had already passed away. Pathologists later found concrete under
09:38his fingernails, suggesting that even after the coffin gave way, Joe may have still been trying
09:42to dig himself out. But, the most disturbing part is that this collapse wasn't some freak accident no
09:48one could have seen coming. Joe's entire plan depended on him escaping the coffin in under a minute,
09:53because once the concrete covered him, there was almost no room for delay. But, during practice,
09:58the same escape had taken 5 minutes. On top of that, the plastic coffin had already cracked during one
10:04of the earlier practice runs. But, instead of replacing it, Joe patched it up himself using
10:09glue from a hardware store. Even Joe's own assistant later said that he never calculated
10:13the combined weight of the dirt and wet concrete together, and that his only test of the coffin's
10:18strength was jumping on it. In the end, Joe Boris died on the same night as the magician he had
10:23spent
10:24his whole career trying to surpass. At around 9.30 p.m. on May 28th, 1982, viewers in Phoenix,
10:34Arizona had their regular programming interrupted by an unscheduled broadcast on KOOL.
10:41Us to relay to you. Mr. Gwynne, is it alright for our guest to leave the studio now? Alright,
10:46you may leave now. On the screen was veteran news director Bill Close, sitting next to a man he
10:52addressed as only Mr. Gwynne, and reading aloud from a handwritten script. This is the script that
10:59Mr. Gwynne gave me, and I'm going to read it verbatim, and anytime you wish to interrupt me.
11:06The words jumped between country music singers, religious prophecies, civil war, and a coming
11:11World War III. To the viewers watching at home, the broadcast looked strange enough on its own,
11:16but what they couldn't see was a .38 caliber rifle aimed directly at Bill's stomach beneath the desk.
11:22The man sitting beside him was 28-year-old Joseph Billy Gwynne, and roughly four and a half hours
11:27earlier, he had forced his way into the KOOL building carrying that revolver and a small portable
11:32television monitor. The first person he came across was production assistant Nancy Petranka,
11:37whom he confronted before pushing past her and forcing his way deeper into the station,
11:41where another employee named Louis Villa stepped in his way and tried to stop him.
11:45By it, Joseph pistol-whipped him across the head, locked him into a chokehold,
11:49and dragged him straight onto the set where Bill and two other station employees were preparing to
11:53go live for the evening news. With four employees now under his control, Joseph fired a single
11:58shot into the ceiling to prove his weapon was real. But when Bill asked what he wanted,
12:03Joseph's answer only raised more questions.
12:19By then, the people inside the station had already realized they were dealing with someone
12:23whose grip on reality was slipping, badly. Over the next several hours, Bill worked the phone
12:28with police negotiators, carefully relaying Joseph's demand to appear on television and have
12:32his statement read live on air. And every time he spoke to police, he had to walk back over to
12:37Joseph
12:37and calm him down before he started believing he was being stalled or ignored. But as the hours dragged
12:42on, Joseph became increasingly convinced that the station had no intention of broadcasting his message.
12:47And the longer he waited, the more desperate he became. So, with Joseph growing more unstable and
12:53a loaded revolver still pressed against Louie, police finally agreed to let him go live on air
12:57with Bill at around 9.30pm.
13:08For the next 21 minutes, Bill read Joseph's 11-page, almost incoherent statement live to the people
13:15of Phoenix.
13:16The 10 prophets are Johnny Cash, Ronnie Millsap, Eddie Rabbit, Barbara Mondrell, Joe Gwynn, the traitor.
13:24The Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette can verify this story. 16 years ago in September,
13:31about the 25th of 1966, all of these people's names above meet at the same time, including me.
13:38I was almost 13 years old. We all meet, and we're together at the same hour. Mysteriously,
13:44I was the only one who knew what it was about. The others didn't. I did.
13:49The more Bill read, the harder the message became to follow, drifting from biblical prophecy
13:54into Islamophobic rambling.
13:56Then the angel shows me a book about me and the life I was supposed to live. The angel told
14:04me the
14:04story about the 10 prophets. Then he told me I was a watchman. Ezekiel chapter 33. The angel told me
14:11I would meet all these people, the 10 prophets, the country singers. This is these people's part
14:16in the end they have in this. Back to the beginning. Islam used sociology on our people.
14:23Islam is using this sociology on children. They used it on my generation to start the hippie movement
14:29and drugs, and on today's generation to turn them into punks and punk rockers by hypnotism.
14:36As the statement went on, Joseph's prophecies got even more bizarre, describing an American
14:41civil war and a third world war that he believed were coming in the years ahead.
14:45Islam is going to blow these cities up with atomic bombs. These five cities are Cyclops in
14:52Pennsylvania, Omenix in Arkansas, Yosetimi in Nebraska, Isolox or Ichabod in Idaho, and
15:02Snicks in New Mexico. All these cities will be isolated. After this happens, there will be
15:09civil war in America. The United States will be divided up into four countries. World War
15:15Three will start in the fall of 1988. Edward Kennedy will lead the United States in World
15:20War Three. He will be the next president and be elected two terms. The angel said we could
15:25unite and fight these Muslims. They're Islam and they're as allies.
15:30But the clearest sign of how far gone Joseph was came from the small monitor he had brought
15:35with him. Throughout the broadcast, he kept checking it to make sure the station was actually
15:39airing his message, as if the only thing Joseph trusted in that room was the version of reality
15:43playing out in his own mind. When Bill finished reading the final page, Joseph calmly handed
15:48to build a revolver and surrendered without resistance.
16:00I got a sweaty palm. I want to shake hands with you. You really do? You bet. I told you
16:04I was playing this fair.
16:06Did you think I was? You didn't trust me all this time. Oh, hell, it's all right. Leave him alone.
16:12It's okay. Put down the guns. I have the gun. Back off with the guns.
16:16By that point, every person in that studio had spent almost five hours trapped inside a situation
16:21that could have changed any moment Joseph stopped believing Bill was on his side.
16:25Joseph was later charged with four counts of armed kidnapping, three counts of aggravated
16:30assault, and first-degree burglary. But after pleading no contest, he was declared legally insane
16:35and committed to the Arizona State Hospital. However, Joseph was released just six months later,
16:40despite prosecutors and even some of the psychiatrists involved warning that they weren't
16:44convinced he was safe to be back out in public. And two years after the hostage crisis, the same
16:49delusions appeared again. Joseph was arrested at a Phoenix convenience store after assaulting
16:53and threatening two clerks while screaming that Johnny Cash was going to kill his family.
16:58This time, the arrest triggered a probation violation from the original hostage case.
17:02Joseph was sent to prison, and he wouldn't be released until 2005,
17:06more than two decades after he first walked into that newsroom with a gun.
17:14On March 5th, 1989, a local news crew in Monks Corner, South Carolina was filming the third day
17:19of the search for five-year-old Justin Lee Turner. Two days earlier, Justin's stepmother,
17:24Pamela Turner, had called the Berkeley County Sheriff's Office after he never came home from
17:28school. According to Pamela, Justin had left that morning to catch the bus from a neighbor's
17:32property a few hundred yards away. But when the bus returned that afternoon, he wasn't on it.
17:37And once police checked with the school and other witnesses, they learned that he never made it to
17:42the bus that morning. For the next two days, local police, the Berkeley County Rescue Squad,
17:47and dozens of volunteers searched the area around the Turner property off Horseshoe Road.
17:51They combed through the woods surrounding the home and checked sheds, storage spaces,
17:55and abandoned structures across the property, but still found no sign of Justin. By the morning of
18:00March 5th, search crews were getting ready to spend another full day going back around the same
18:05ground while a local TV crew from WCBD followed them around documenting the search.
18:10Go all the way. Crawl.
18:12By it, the search barely lasted five minutes, as Justin's father, Victor Lee Turner, walked up to
18:18an old camper on the family's property and looked inside.
18:22My son's in there. Everybody stand back. Everybody stand back.
18:29Inside a cabinet in the camper was the body of five-year-old Justin Lee Turner. And in the few
18:35seconds caught by the TV crew right after the discovery, Victor may have revealed something he
18:39never intended to. The Turner property was immediately locked down as a crime scene.
18:44State agents started searching through the camper in the family's home, checking for fingerprints,
18:48and trying to figure out how Justin ended up hidden there in the first place.
18:51Autopsy results later showed that Justin was strangled to death. But the physical evidence
18:56from the camper led nowhere, and the case went on to stall for years to come. Without any solid lead,
19:02attention slowly shifted back to the moment Justin was found. Investigators found that,
19:06according to reports, the camper had already been searched during the first two days Justin was
19:11missing, and nothing had been found inside. So, if those earlier searches were done properly,
19:16then someone had placed Justin's body there after the search was already underway,
19:20while police, volunteers, and reporters were still moving around the property.
19:24That meant the killer had enough access to the Turner property to return to the camper without
19:29being noticed. Even the footage captured by the TV crew added to that suspicion. When Victor looked
19:34inside the camper, he didn't seem to rush in to check whether Justin was still alive. He didn't even
19:39call out his name or try to pull him out. He backed away almost immediately, as if he already knew
19:43what he was going to find. Now, to be fair, there's no single normal way for a parent to react
19:49to
19:49something like that. But investigators still found the behavior difficult to ignore, especially
19:53considering how quickly Victor went straight to the camper once the search resumed, then located
19:58Justin within seconds despite the camper having multiple drawers and cabinets. But despite all of
20:03these observations, the suspicion around Victor and Pamela still wasn't enough to hold up in court.
20:08Most of what pointed toward them was circumstantial, and without physical evidence separating normal
20:13family contact from the day Justin died, investigators had no way to turn those suspicions into something
20:19prove. As the years passed and the case went cold, Victor and Pamela eventually left Berkeley
20:24County and moved to South Carolina's upstate. And, according to investigators, neither of them
20:29ever contacted law enforcement again to ask about the case or whether any progress had been made.
20:34For decades, that was where the suspicion stayed. But years later, a new possibility emerged that hinted
20:40at something far more chilling than a family cover-up. In September 2023, a law professor at the
20:46University of Virginia and her students were mapping the movements of serial killer Richard
20:50Mark Ivanitz when one of them uncovered something unexpected. Richard had served in the Navy, and
20:55after tracking down naval records, the student found that the ship he was assigned to arrived in Charleston
21:00on March 3rd, 1989, the same day Justin vanished. Monk's corner, where the Turners lived, was only about a
21:0750-minute drive from the port. And, once researchers started comparing Richard's known crimes to Justin's case,
21:13the similarities became difficult to ignore. But, just like the theory surrounding the Turners, there was still
21:18no physical evidence directly tying Richard to Justin's death. Unfortunately, the police couldn't question him
21:24because, by that time, Richard had already been dead for more than 20 years. He had lost his life in
21:29a police
21:29chase in Florida in 2002 after one of his kidnapping victims escaped and identified him to authorities. To make
21:35matters worse, his body was cremated and his ashes scattered, leaving no way to test his DNA against anything from
21:41Justin's case. So, instead of pulling suspicion away from the Turners, the theory only left investigators
21:46stuck between two possibilities that were both disturbing in completely different ways. Either
21:51someone close to Justin had killed him and hidden his body back on the property while the search was
21:56already happening, or a serial killer from outside had somehow entered that same space without leaving
22:01proof behind. The answer remained uncertain for decades, until investigators announced what looked like
22:07the first real break in the case in 35 years. Using newer forensic testing methods, investigators
22:12re-examined microscopic fibers recovered from Justin's shirt and compared them to a rope found inside the
22:18Turner home. According to them, the fibers were consistent with the possibility that the same rope had
22:23been used to strangle him. Shortly afterwards, 68-year-old Victor and 63-year-old Pamela Turner were both
22:29arrested and charged with Justin's murder in January 2024. And, for the first time in decades,
22:35it looked like the case might finally be heading towards some kind of answer, but just a few months
22:39later, it fell apart again. In June 2024, Judge Roger Young dismissed the charges with prejudice,
22:46ruling that after 35 years, with over 20 witnesses either dead or unable to testify and no real new
22:52evidence on the table, there was no way to give the Turners a fair trial. Because it was dismissed with
22:57prejudice, the decision was permanent and the charges can never be refiled. So, after everything,
23:02the mystery of Justin's murder landed right where it started in 1989, and those few seconds of
23:08footage captured by WCBD may still be the closest thing this case ever gets to an answer.
23:17On the morning of June 26, 1995, viewers in Mason City, Iowa tuned into their regular Monday
23:23morning newscast on KIMT. On screen was 27-year-old news anchor Jody Hoosentrude, smiling through the
23:39early morning broadcast with their co-host, Kevin Scarupa. The two hosts talked lightheartedly as they
23:44discussed the weather for the day ahead. At the time, there was no reason for anyone watching to
23:49remember these moments. By it, this would soon become the last broadcast Jody would ever appear
23:53in. The next morning, Jody was supposed to arrive at the station by 3.30am to prepare for the 6am
23:59newscast. By it, when she didn't show up, producer Amy Kunz called her apartment at around 4.10am.
24:05Jody answered, sounding like she had just woken up. She said she had overslept and told Amy she would be
24:10right there. That was the last confirmed contact anyone ever had with Jody Hoosentrude.
24:15By 6am, when Jody still hadn't arrived, Amy was forced to anchor the show without her.
24:20And that alone was enough to worry the newsroom, because Jody had never missed a newscast before.
24:25Shortly after 7am, her co-workers called the police. When officers arrived at her apartment,
24:29the reason she never made it to work became clear within minutes. Jody's car was still parked just
24:34outside her apartment building, but everything around it suggested she had been attacked right
24:39as she was trying to leave. Scattered around the car were her belongings, including her shoes,
24:44blow dryer, hair spray can, earrings, and a bent car key. Nearby officers also found drag marks on the
24:51pavement and clear signs of a struggle. When investigators spoke to the people in the apartment
24:55complex, some residents said they had heard screams around the time Jody would have been leaving for
25:00work. Another resident reported seeing a white 40 Conoline van idling nearby. But none of those
25:06details reached police until after Jody was already gone. By the time they pieced everything together,
25:10they had an idea of what could have taken place. She probably made it to her car and was unlocking
25:15the front door when someone attacked her from behind, explaining the bent car key. But finding
25:20who did it would prove to be a far more challenging task. With no usable fingerprints, tire tracks, or
25:26clear eyewitnesses, investigators turned their attention to the people in Jody's life to find the
25:31answer. The first name to draw serious attention was 49-year-old John Van Syce. The night before she
25:37disappeared, Jody had gone to his home to watch a video from a surprise birthday party he had thrown
25:41for her two weeks earlier. On its own, nothing about that visit seemed unusual. By adding to some of
25:47Jody's friends, John's feelings towards her had started to seem strange. Even though they both
25:51described the relationship as a friendship, people around her sensed that his attachment to Jody was
25:56turning into an obsession, to the point that he even named his boat after her. So, naturally, when Jody
26:02vanished just hours after leaving his home, all this context turned him into a potential suspect.
26:07But that suspicion never turned into proof. John cooperated with investigators, provided DNA,
26:13passed a polygraph test, and years later, police even placed GPS trackers on his vehicles to see
26:17if his movements might lead them somewhere. But none of it produced anything tying him to Jody's
26:22disappearance. And as it turned out, John wouldn't be the last person in Jody's life whose attachment to
26:27her caught investigators' attention. However, for the next two years, every possible lead
26:32investigators came across seemed to end in a similar way. Close enough to raise questions,
26:37not strong enough to answer them. This went on until 1997, when a new name entered the investigation.
26:43A man named Tony Jackson was arrested in the Minneapolis area around that time.
26:47When police looked backward through his timeline, two details stood out immediately.
26:51At the time Jody disappeared, Tony had been living in Mason City only two blocks from the KIMT
26:56station where she worked, and close enough to her apartment for the connection to matter.
27:00On top of that, the nature of his confirmed crimes involved stalking, abducting, and sudden violence
27:05against women, which fit the kind of offender who could have walked in an apartment parking lot
27:09before sunrise and attacked without warning. But once again, the case stopped at the same wall.
27:15His DNA didn't match the physical evidence recovered from the scene, and after a full review of the
27:19evidence and a polygraph, Mason City Police confirmed that he wasn't considered a viable suspect
27:25in May of 1999. By then, nearly four years had passed without Jody being found. And on May 14,
27:312001, she was declared legally dead. But the case never really went cold. Her story became one of the
27:37most discussed disappearances in the country because of consistent national coverage. But even with that
27:43exposure, the investigation would go nearly three decades without any breakthrough strong enough to
27:48change the direction of the case. Then, in 2025, a Hulu documentary brought another name to the
27:54spotlight. And this time, the information came from someone who had known Jody since childhood.
27:59Patty Niemeyer was one of Jody's closest friends growing up, and she had been married to a man named
28:03Brad Millerburn. But according to Patty, Brad had been fixated on Jody throughout their marriage.
28:09And this fixation eventually became one of the reasons for their divorce, which was finalized on
28:14June 23, 1995, exactly four days before Jody disappeared. Once investigators looked closer at
28:20Brad, one detail pulled the case back to something witnesses had reported from the very beginning.
28:25At the time of the abduction, Brad had access to a white Ford Econoline van, which he used for work.
28:30It was the same type of vehicle someone had seen near Jody's apartment that morning.
28:34Once this connection was established, investigators showed Patty a few sketches of a man who had
28:39reportedly been seen around Jody's apartment complex before she disappeared.
28:42When Patty looked at these sketches, she seemed confident that they looked like Brad.
28:47Unfortunately, just like every other person of interest in this case,
28:51that lead never turned into anything meaningful. Brad denied any involvement with the disappearance
28:55and cooperated with investigators. And after multiple interrogations and thorough property
29:00searches, officials found no forensic link connecting him to the crime scene.
29:04So, even after thousands of tips and several persons of interest over the decades,
29:08no one has ever been arrested or charged for Jody's disappearance. And, more than 30 years later,
29:14the broadcast from the morning of June 26, 1995, still remains the last public record of Jody
29:20Jody who's intrude alive.
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