September 2025

“No one wants to know who Christine was,” her brother said years later. “They want to sensationalize what happened at the end of her life.”

He has a powerful point. How many people even know that Christine survived the loss of her first, early love, from death in an automobile accident? Or that she did volunteer puppet shows for special groups, many times?

Christine Chubbuck grew up in the upscale Ohio suburb of Harbor with her parents, George and Peg, and two brothers, Tim and the younger Greg. The only daughter of a high-end automotive and manufacturing industry salesperson and a housewife, Christine was talented and smart. While in middle school, she was a flutist in the high school marching band. She later developed an interest in acting at private school and enrolled in the University of North Carolina summer acting program.

Christine was a bright, gifted student with a sharp wit and a nationally ranked kayaker, but since she was about 10 she never felt that she fit in.

Greg recalls his older brother, Tim, taking him aside and telling him their time with “Chrissie” would be short-lived.

“We have to hug Chrissie extra hard because we aren’t going to have her very long,” Greg recalls. “He was 12 and I was 8 and in the back of our minds we always knew that our time with her was not going to be infinite.”

Greg says his parents spent over $1 million, over 20 years, with psychiatrists and psychologists to “help Chrissie find peace.” In the end, of course, it wouldn’t work.

However trying her teen years were, Christine went on to earn a degree in broadcasting at Boston University, worked at a Florida cable station, and attended a summer film workshop at NYU. She later secured jobs at public television stations in Pittsburgh and Canton, Ohio. Christine moved to Florida to live with her mother after her parents divorced. She worked as a hospital computer operator before landing a job as a reporter, then a host at WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida.

“It was her show,” says Greg. “It was one person doing all of it with very low pay.”

Everyone in the family went out of their way to help Christine with her television career. Her mother paid for designer dresses to make sure she looked good on air. Despite having her own morning television show, Greg says his sister never felt she was good enough.

“I think, ” said her mother, “She was saying, ‘Look, world. I’ve been here all along. How about a date Saturday night? But her last act was the most selfish thing she ever did. She brought her death into other people’s homes.”

(Some of the biographical material above was condensed from: Down Memory Lane by David Lobosco, Feb. 1, 2016)

A final note on the everyman, everywoman take on this tragedy. Some of the comments posted on David Lobosco’s blog were adamant, for example, about defining Chubbuck’s mental illness, choc-full of armchair analysis. Was she bi-polar, was she on the autism spectrum, was she a classic depressive, and why? Everyone in the world, it seems, has a psychology degree.

Anonymous January 19, 2017 “I’ve seen hours of footage of her, this is CLEAR Aspergers…. depression is common among Aspies because they very often can’t understand why they cannot experience the same kind of feelings other people have…. I’ve a 25 yo daughter with Aspergers and the similarities, after watching footage of her are so uncanny….it literally scared the sh-t outta me. Also, post operative depression is EXTREMELY common after having a unilateral oophorectomy…. I’m an RN and have seen it multiple times.

I’m beginning to think there’s something hormonal/chemical involved…. There’s simply too many women who have this acute onset of depression without ever having experienced depression before.”

Jeff Chicken June 1, 2021 “Enter the armchair psychologists who think they can diagnose autism from one written bio and an old blurry newsreel, of which there’s only one…

I have autism. I’m not going to say that Christine’s got it, because honestly, all her description really tells us is that she was socially troubled, a mentally ill spinster with a wealthy family, and that she suffered a traumatic loss as a teenager. I fail to see “autism” in this. Chalking up anybody socially awkward, introverted or unlucky in love as “autistic” seems a tad presumptuous.”

Boudicca 3 September 23, 2021
“Oh my goodness – the comments above are between those who want to label and diagnose a person they never met – Aspergers (which basically covers just about everyone on the planet) seeming to fit or bipolar – or those religious maniacs who think God should forgive her! The sad truth is likely to be much less wishy-washy and simply the fact she was lonely, didn’t have a boyfriend and felt her entire identity as a girl/woman/human being rested on being in a relationship. That idea is THE most common reason why people commit suicide including over 2000 on Mount Mihara in the 1930s. Those same people – desperately seeking a mental disorder for a very ordinary and boring human issue would most likely be the same people who think there’s something wrong with anyone who chooses to be single. So one can’t win. Truth is, the only emotions Christine herself expressed were ones of ‘not fitting in’ – a very common adolescent and early 20’s expression caused – yes caused – not by depression but a social value that says people should ‘fit in’ to something in the first place. We are all unique individuals however and what we gain and get in life is largely determined by our own attitude; however tragic, Christine Chubbuck was driven to her death by her own ego and nothing else.”

Behind the tragedy ending the life of this sincere and idealistic young woman, there will always be the most enduring mystery of all: the human psyche.

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How many of us as kids were told by our parents that carrots are good for our eyes? The vegetable’s enduring reputation emerged as a propaganda campaign during World War II.

In attempts to keep their innovative radar technology a secret, the British Royal Air Force credited carrots for their pilots’ increased success battling German airplanes at night.

Advertisements for the surplus crop popped up everywhere. Popular slogans such as, “Carrots keep you healthy and help you see in the blackout” and “Night sight can mean life or death” encouraged the public to consume carrots. In 1941, cartoon character, Doctor Carrot – the Children’s Best Friend, swarmed newspapers, posters, and radio shows.

Since sugar was rationed, they were promoted as a sweetener and recipes for carrot cake, pudding, and jams pushed the idea that the war could be won in the kitchen.

Disney even created a British cartoon carrot family to fuel the carrot craze. The U.K. and U.S. carrot habit increased immensely.

Carrot consumption won’t necessarily improve eye health unless one is deficient in vitamin A and experiencing night blindness. In these cases, a steady diet of carrots could help eyes adjust to low levels of light. It’s not a miracle snack–but is there harm in telling kids that if it gets them to eat more veggies?

As for the German enemies, there are accounts of commanders feeding their troops carrots, but it’s unlikely they were entirely fooled. It may have been possible to verify radar presence by simply flying over the U.K. and listening to the different radio frequencies.

Still, the WWII military-born myth has lived on for decades.

A local Ohio paper ran a small article in late June of 2017 that began with a bang: “No one knows how many bodies may lie beneath Schneider Park in West Akron.” That would catch the attention of the dead themselves.

Besides being the kind of lead they teach as effective journalism, it also sums up the reality. Now a city-owned park, over a century ago it was the most informal of graveyards, a dumping ground for those who couldn’t afford a proper burial.

Institutions such as a the town “infirmary” were near by, where the feeble-bodied and feeble-minded were warehoused on their last stop in life’s journey. They and others from sad walks of life found their way to eternity, just under the earth, surely hundreds of them but a precise number is elusive. Headstones and markers were niceties not much used, and record keeping by our standards today could fairly be called lax.

An archaeology professor had his students survey the park this summer—technologies to estimate gravesites but not digging and disturbing bones. Their report will try to shed light on the use of the land over time, and the number of graves.
Should they be followed by a team of “mystery analysts,” sleuths who will go beyond facts and numbers and try to unearth the human stories, every bit as compelling as unearthed bones?

Most of the deaths were probably legitimate, unavoidable. The humble, anonymous burials were matters not of scandal but of the times themselves and the poverty of industrial workers.
But if someone had deaths to cover up, bodies to hide, where better than amidst a thousand other nameless, silent bones? What would some of the dead tell you, beg you to understand, if they could speak across time?

All the dead, in fact, would have a story to tell. To die without friends or means is not to die without a history. Perhaps these are lives that can be traced, stories we can someday know.

In a book from 2015, Richard Belzer and his co-authors review a mystery which has evolved a little, but surprisingly little in some ways, across several years. Some of the early comments still ring true to many analysts:

These authors refer to someone they respect who stressed, early on, “six important facts you’re not being told” about MH370.

“Fact #1: All Boeing 777 commercial jets are equipped with black box recorders that can survive any explosion.

Fact #2: All black box recorders transmit locator signals for at least 30 days after falling into the ocean.

Fact #3: Many parts of destroyed aircraft are naturally bouyant and will float in water.

Fact #4: If a missile destroyed Flight 370, the missile would have left a radar signature.

Fact#5: The location of the aircraft when it vanished is not a mystery.

Fact#6: If Flight 370 was hijacked, it would not have vanished from radar.

Conclusion: Flight 370 did not explode; it vanished…the inescapable conclusion is that Flight 370 simply vanished in some way that we do not yet understand.”

Belzer, Noory, and Wayne , 2015,”Someone is Hiding Something,” p.212

We don’t know if “someone is hiding something” (it’s entirely possible), or if any of those facts are secret, but we know this: several years in, we don’t know that much more than we did eleven days after, when the CBC broadcast the report we featured in the previous section.

And that alone is astounding. We can’t think of a modern aviation disaster that’s generated fewer clear facts, yet generated myriad theories, in inverse proportion. If you had a dollar for each television report or mini-doc on this subject since March of 2014, you’d be wealthy by now. 

It’s a sort of pathetic cottage industry–go on cable television, look and sound important, and spout things you don’t know, because frankly no one does. 

But in the midst of all that, there are some attemps, fact by fact, to reason deductively and make sense of unprecedented events.  All the theory-making can at times serve a purpose. 

In one of those mini-docs with over-the-top names starting with words like “the real truth behind”…nevertheless we’re reminded of the importance of looking at, and discarding theories one by one, over time, based on evidence. 

“It may be confusing to see so many theories evolving about the loss of an aircraft and it’s a very technical issue, but all those theories are actually very useful, and it’s not ‘conspiracy theory’ but all of the side theories might put light on an unusual situation–so the forensic scientists who’ve got very open minds have to incorporate everything that’s coming up.”         Dr. Sally Leivesley, Catastrophic Risk Advisor, from “The Real Truth Behind Malaysian Flight 370

 But what do we know?  In clear weather a superb aircraft suffered some sort of collapse of its normal functioning, yet leaving us with almost no clue.  As another contributor to that same report reminds us, in a normal catastrophic failure the flight would have soon come down in pieces that we would have long since located.  In most air disasters, the first photos the public sees are of the wreckage. 

So what, then? 

Two passengers travelled on MH370 on stolen passports, we’re told early on. A meaningful clue? Possibly, but…shifty people slink around the world all the time. The Titanic probably held a hundred people running from something, but not involved with the sinking of the ship. There’s no evidence those Iranians with false passports, or anyone else, hijacked the plane. If it was hijacked (not too likely) it was a botched or confused operation–no one ever claimed it, the plane probably did not survive or leave survivors. No purpose, no apparent motive. 

Although intelligent life in our universe is probable, aliens involved in the MH370 disappearance is not. Only slightly more probable is the execution of a secret plan to spirit the plane deep into Asia for…for…why would that be again? What would be gained by bringing the plane down on remote Asian steppes, disappearing surviving passengers, and repainting a Boeing 777 that you’d can’t really hide, or use, or gain any benefit from. What’s the point? 

And remember, it stretches the limits enough for the plane to have disappeared so thoroughly over water. Over land, with airports and radar scanning the sky at regular intervals? Not likely, unless “someone is hiding something,” although that would have to be a lot of someones, doing a lot of hiding.  Yet we do have reason to wonder if some information has been suppressed, for whatever reason. 

The captain, they tell us a couple of years later, had plugged unusual flight paths into his home-built flight simulator. Meaning what, exactly? We’ll also consider that specious news until something more solid can be made of it.  Nonetheless, one of those flight paths supposedly aimed at the landing strip at the ultra-secret U.S. military base at Diego Garcia, south of the Indian subcontinent.  Why would he be toying with that idea?   And with the powerful U.S. intelligence presence surrounding that base, wouldn’t a flight astray over the Indian Ocean be noticed? 

A cyber-hijacking?  Perhaps more logical than many of the theories, it would explain why the flight went radio silent, changed course erratically, flew to nowhere for no seeming reason.  A chilling throught: some of the world’s most talented cyber criminals may have just been experimenting, testing their skills for a really purposeful mission at a future time.  Unlikely?  Yes, but Dr. Leivesley, the same expert who challenged us to have “very open minds,” offers the possibility as real and worth exploring. 

Little hints, morsels of potential evidence, scraps of theories, have been discussed for years now. Any shred of a clue’s soon pounced on by those hungry for answers. The mystery remains intact. 

All that’s not to say that time hasn’t shed a little light, a very little, on the disappearance. When we said in the first section that MH370 vanished “without a trace,” well, over time, we think we have some traces. 

A flaperon, part of the wing assembly, and some other debris probably from the flight began showing up in, yes, the Indian Ocean, washing up on the surrounding shores. 

That flaperon, all by itself, has taken on a life of its own, and it does represent something tangible, and intriguing. We’ve even seen a mini-documentary where a man speaking in logical sequences offers a pointed assessment. 

Look carefully at that flaperon, he says, and you’ll see something in very unusual shape. Not cracked into a hundred pieces. Rather seemingly sheared off along its outer edge, as if deployed in a downward position upon contact with the water, not a nose-first dive into water, but more an attempt at a controlled landing. Therefore, we know that a pilot attempted a water landing, the plane didn’t just crash into the brink out of control. 

His theory depends on a chain of sequence and logic, but we have to admit, it does explain the condition of that large piece of aircraft. We do wonder however, if other crash scenarios could have produced that same piece, sheared off along its edge. If we go for attempted-landing-theory as logical, we’re faced with lots of questions. Why, how, would that plane fly that far, still under human control, still over water? Why try to land it on the ocean–that’s never, ever gone well in the history of aviation. 

Could we be looking at a scenario in which a pilot, or some human agent, got control of the plane just in time to have to ditch on water, and took their best shot at it? Unlike that famous landing in the U.S. on the smooth Hudson River, with perfect weather and rescue boats within clear view, this would have been pointless, with everyone soon on their way to ocean’s bottom. So which presents more challenge, designing a scenario for a landing far out in the ocean, or a scenario in which that flaperon comes off in that unexpected shape? 

In any event, our working hypothesis has to be that the plane did go down, as originally suspected, in some remote part of the Indian Ocean, hours after changing course. 

But just how, why, did that flight deep into nowhere, over the water until fuel ran out, come about? 

Here at Mind Over Mystery we often steer clear of the bloodiest, grisliest crime scenes. There’s a hundred other sites and podcasts that specialize in “true crime,” the bloodier the better– “it bleeds it leads” and all that. We focus on mental challenges, stories of crime and history and psychology and espionage and science that give the mind numerous paths to travel.

But now and again, a “sensational” killing also rises to be an absorbing study.

The thumbnail of the case is simple enough, if a bit bizarre even on it’s surface. A twenty-six year old male, Trenton Cornell-Duranleau was found stabbed to death–we’re talking perhaps seventy wounds– in the home of his lover, Wyndham Latham. A researcher in microbiology on faculty at Northwestern University, it’s alleged Latham had a chatroom relationship with one Andrew Warren, employed across the ocean with the Cambridge University system. He paid for Warren to fly to Chicago, it’s said, expressly to go hands-on with sex-murder-suicide fantasies of some tortured shape that had been hatched on-line.

After the bloody events, Latham and Warren hit the road, in a rented car, for days. With the hope of doing what? Every law enforcement official on the planet would be on the lookout for them, sooner or later. Remorseful at some level from the start, they made donations as they traveled in Trenton’s name, one to an organization that serves the LGBT community in health and social services.

They surrendered peacefully in California. Indictments, for murder, have recently come down for the pair, representing prestigious institutions on two continents.

As bizarre as all this may sound, unless pleas are changed, the case may light up a courtroom one day with turns and surprises.

“We hope that anyone who reads about the case doesn’t have a rush to judgment,” one of their attorneys stressed. “There’s a wide possibility of scenarios that could have occurred here.”

Many possible scenarios? Presumably, dozens of stab wounds will not be called “self-defense.” Or an accident, as in, how clumsy of me. Just what scenarios could account for the butchery that authorities encountered in Latham’s Chicago apartment?

Two grown and educated men, heading away from this scene like boys running from a petty fire they’ve started in a schoolyard. There’s nothing about this case that doesn’t make you shake your head.

As a study of human psychology, twisted variety, it’s going to be one for the books.

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It just doesn’t happen every day, as a matter of fact, the number of precedents that we can remember for this scenario are… well… zero, none.

It was April 18, 2016, at the Creekside Church of Christ, in Midlothian, Texas. An individual in full police riot gear wandering–some would say shuffling–through the halls of a large, rural church at four o’clock in the morning, looking for…money, their murder victim, what? No one is even sure of a motive, eighteen months and counting.

The brief video footage gives an eerie feeling, as if from a horror film, not small-town Texas. But all too real: the figure appeared to open and close doors, searching for something, some type of hammer in hand. At five o’clock, fitness instructor Terri “Missi” Bevers arrived ahead of her early morning class. Early arriving students found her hammered to death, leaving a husband and three young daughters behind.

The few seconds of security video of the presumed killer offer all the insight authorities have. They’ve been pouring serious man-hours into the case, following up on file drawers full of leads. They don’t even have a viable suspect.

But how can that be?
The numerous questions this case raises could wear out the question mark on your keyboard.

To touch just the top of Sherlock’s list, was that a man or woman, out of shape and with an awkward gait, stalking the halls before Terri’s arrival? (Should we make anything of the irony that a stupendously fit woman was attacked and dispatched by someone she could have outrun in her sleep?)

Are we even positive that no other player was at the scene, undetected by surveillance video, and the mystery “SWAT team” member not the perpetrator at all?

Assuming Terri was killed by the disguised “policeman,” was he or she interrupted mid-burglary, startled by someone arriving so early, and merely struck out before fleeing? Or was this killer stalking her all along?

The internet, Facebook and the rest, have lit up with thousands of amateur sleuths tracking this one, to the dismay of official investigators. Apparently, with most of these on-line Columbos, the thirst to be Sherlock exceeds their powers of rational thought and sense of genuine evidence. People long cleared by the authorities are still harassed by Facebook trolls with too much interest, and too little good judgment.

At MindOverMystery we’ve never seen anything quite like it.

If we ever know the truth, what will emerge? Another Texas serial-killer case, with this sick individual tracking Terri on LinkedIn, and plotting a visit to her pre-dawn class?

Will a suspect yet emerge from cooperation among profilers…stand by.

Aaron Feis acted with extraordinary heroism. He draped himself over students as a school shooter went on a rampage. Although fourteen kids died at Parkland, the number would have been higher without the selfless acts of Coach Feis.

The question is why? Why him, why then?

It’s an issue we’ve looked at before and will again, because there’s no finer psychological mystery.

Other kinds of moral challenge occurs with plenty of time to think: a very unlikable person is about to go to prison for a serious crime, let’s say, and a witness who knows of his innocence sticks his neck out at great personal risk. Weeks may go by as the person weighs his moral pebbles on the scale of right and wrong, and finally decides what his conscience can live with.

But in the crises of the battlefield or a shooting at a school, some kind of auto-pilot of response to emergencies kicks in.

But do we know why, how?

Would it be the same in every such situation, or have some variability by mood, by moment?

We can’t very easily test our theories on human subjects, we can’t shoot and point a camera at the results.

Nonetheless we ask our community of the curious, please help us solve the mystery of heroism.

That’s the challenge for Hollywood. A real, major criminal investigation grinds away with more dull moments than the worst high school class you can remember. Agents and clerks of all stripes pour over old phone records, or old bank statements, or some form of ancient paperwork until they think their eyes may drop out of their head. Dull boxes of day-old pizza, strewn around the tables they hunch over for endless hours, seem interesting by comparison. And guys at a stakeout sit so long they swear their butts are going to turn into car upholstery.

The point is that many mysteries are solved one grain of sand at a time, and television falls short as a medium to capture a process of slow sweat, not fast glamour. Thus don’t expect Discovery Channel’s miniseries on the manhunt to rope in the Unabomber to stick to the rails of the true story. Dozens of agents are collapsed into one–the audience gets its protagonist in agent James Fitzgerald–and lots of hokey personal angles are injected to spice up a technical story.

Even with those limitations, you should stream the series on Netflix anyway!
Mystery analysts will find two veins to mine deeply and richly as the episodes roll by.

For one, the emergence of forensic linguistics as a powerful, intriguing tool to establish identities. In simplest form, we all have vast unconscious patterns in our communication, from spelling quirks to the regional use of words, to unusual vocabulary preferences, to the syntax and pattern and overall style with which we express ourselves. If I write a long article, even a long note, a rigorous analysis could well identify me as the author. The novel Primary Colors, made into the film starring John Travolta and Emma Thompson, was published anonymously, until academic linguist Don Foster pinned it on journalist Joe Klein, who finally “confessed.”

And second, the emergence of the broader field of “behavioral analysis” –a new world in which the psychologist’s report equals all the bagged chemical forensics–blooms throughout this series. After all, the Unabomber by definition would have to be quite a piece of work, psychologically speaking. But how do you arrive at a useful profile?

The raw destruction of Kaczynski’s actions make him easy fodder as the character of one-dimensional evil, or one-dimensional insanity, or both. But later series episodes surprise us with the sympathetic light cast on Kaczynski’s past torments, and his bucolic lifestyle. His egregious betrayal by a Harvard professor he admired alone invites another entire mini-series.

There’s so much to explore here we’ll return from time to time to dive down these tunnels of psychology and logic.

Meanwhile do yourself a favor. Stream the series.