Mysteries and Histories

In 2003, construction workers smashing up the basement of a former Manhattan nightclub broke through a slab of concrete and uncovered a rolled rug, a skull, and the bound, strangled remains of a teenage girl no one could name. For more than twenty years she was “Midtown Jane Doe,” a mystery buried under Hell’s Kitchen, until forensic genealogy finally matched her degraded DNA to a 9/11 victim’s mother and revealed she was 16‑year‑old Patricia Kathleen McGlone from Brooklyn, a runaway bride and new mother who was never even reported missing.
Now investigators know Patricia married musician Donald Grant and that his address was the very building where her body was entombed in concrete, making him a key person of interest but her husband, her baby, and her killer have all vanished into the same silence that kept her hidden for decades.

The Patty Stallings case is a nightmare of bad science turned into a murder charge and a rare example of TV saving the day. In 1989, when Patty’s newborn fell violently ill, lab results were misread as antifreeze poisoning, and she was swiftly branded a baby‑killer, arrested, and convicted even as her second child showed the same terrifying symptoms.
After her story aired on Unsolved Mysteries, watching doctors recognized the pattern as a rare metabolic disorder, methylmalonic acidemia, that only looks like antifreeze poisoning on tests, proving her children were sick because of genetics, not abuse. Patty was eventually cleared, but only after losing a child and years of her life, making her case a stark warning about how quickly “clear evidence” can collapse and how a single TV episode can sometimes do what the justice system failed to do.

Polygraph tests or “lie detectors” sound like the perfect true crime shortcut: strap someone in, ask the right questions, watch the needles jump, and let the machine tell you who’s lying. In reality, they sit in a murky space between science and theatre. They don’t measure lies, they measure stress, heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, sweat, and then a human interpreter decides what those spikes mean, which makes them dangerously persuasive in interrogation rooms and almost useless in courtrooms.
In case after case, people have “passed” while hiding horrific secrets, and others have “failed” simply because they were terrified, traumatized, or anxious, not because they were guilty. That’s why most judges won’t allow polygraph results as hard evidence, and why investigators who lean on them too heavily can end up chasing the wrong suspect or pressuring someone into a confession just to make a bad result go away.

The Jens Söring and Elizabeth Haysom case starts like a doomed campus romance and ends in a blood‑soaked farmhouse and a lifetime of questions. In 1985, the wealthy, respectable Haysom parents were butchered in their Virginia home, their daughter Elizabeth and her boyfriend Jens soon fleeing across Europe, spinning tangled stories about who had really taken the knives to her mother and stepfather. Decades later, after confessions, recantations, trials, and a fiercely disputed conviction, the case still sits in that uncomfortable space between a love story, a family annihilation, and a crime where the truth never quite feels settled.

Feminism isn’t just “girl power” slogans and pink protest signs, it’s a century‑spanning fight that’s come in waves, each one crashing against a different kind of control over women’s lives. The first wave clawed open the doors of citizenship and voting, the second stormed workplaces and bedrooms, the third tore into race, sexuality, and identity, and the fourth is now raging online, calling out abuse, power, and patriarchy in real time for the whole world to see.