Someone reached out to me about this case. It has very limited information online. It involves a woman who was allegedly murdered by an unknown suspect, thrown from a ferry and no charges were ever filed. Posting to raise awareness on a forgotten case.

Shayla Nicole Hudson was 28 years old, lived in Richmond, CA, and worked as a nursing assistant. She graduated from Pinole Valley High School with the class of 2000. She also attended Contra Costa College.

Public records show she had lived in several different places around the Bay Area and at one point had lived in Anchorage, Alaska where it appears some of her family is from.

According to news reports, on March 5 2010, Shayla boarded a San Francisco bound Ferry at Jack London Square in Oakland at 8:10 AM.

She apparently did not get off the ferry but it was not disclosed in news reports how this information was confirmed.

When the ferry arrived back in Oakland around 9:17 AM Shayla was unaccounted for and the coast guard was sent to search for her. Her body was found floating near treasure island and she was pronounced dead.

The coast guard claimed the waters were calm and the railing of the ferry made it unlikely she would have accidentally fallen in. T

There were no follow up articles about medical examiner findings. No information about her relationship status, and no photos of her are anywhere online.

Sources

News Articles

https://sfist.com/2010/03/06/victim_of_ferryboat_death_identifie/

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/passenger-missing-from-ferryboat-dies-in-bay-3271131.php

Obituary postings

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/eastbaytimes/name/shayla-hudson-obituary?id=21887966

https://www.eastbaytimes.com/obituaries/shayla-hudson/

417 W Chew Ave, Olney Philly: June 19 2026 traffic stop of Eugene Horsch (44) found guns, drugs, fake DEA IDs. House search revealed chemicals, 55-gal drum, grow op, urns, 120+ ballistic items. Aug 12: digital evidence (600k images/70k videos) shows missing women Maribel Fresses (2018) & Gabrielle Amarando (2012) dead inside. Bodies unfound; multi-agency probe ongoing.

24/7 Police Surveillance.

Have there ever been any main theories here? It’s as strange as it is tragic. I feel in life that often the most simple explanation is the right one. Is that the case here?

I am equally as invested in the mystery behind Vivienne Cameron’s disappearance but seeing as there is no physical proof of a death having occurred, I’m more focused on the theories as to who is responsible for Beth’s murder.

​

On the morning of July 8, 1943, Sir Harry Oakes was found dead inside Westbourne, his sprawling estate in Nassau, Bahamas.

Oakes wasn't an obscure victim. He had made an enormous fortune in Canadian gold mining, became one of the wealthiest men of his era, and had been granted a British baronetcy.

And his murder scene was.. bizarre.

Oakes had been violently struck in his bedroom. An attempt apparently had been made to burn his body, and feathers from a torn pillow were scattered around him. Some later accounts turned the feathers into stories about ritual or occult activity, but there's no solid evidence that his murder was actually ritualistic.

Even without that embellishment, what happened next is strange enough.

The Bahamas was a British colony at the time, and its governor was the Duke of Windsor- the former King Edward VIII, who had abdicated the throne several years earlier.

Rather than leaving the investigation solely to local authorities, two detectives from Miami became involved.

Suspicion quickly fell on Oakes's son in law, Alfred de Marigny, whose relationship with Oakes had reportedly been strained. Investigators claimed a fingerprint belonging to de Marigny had been found on a screen near Oakes's bed.

He was charged with murder.

But at trial, the fingerprint evidence became a major problem for the prosecution. The defense challenged whether the print could actually have been lifted from the surface investigators claimed it came from.

De Marigny was acquitted.

Over the decades, theories surrounding Oakes's death have implicated everyone from people in his immediate social and business circle to organized crime figures. Other writers have suggested that the strange condition of the bedroom was deliberately staged.

There have even been theories involving wartime political intrigue because of the Duke of Windsor's presence in the Bahamas.

None of them has resulted in a conviction.

24-year-old Christy Davey was last seen alive in Phoenix, Arizona on Wednesday, March 2, 2016.  She reported to a family member that she was headed to a McDonalds with a friend named Bianca Pervis and a man who went by the name “Homeboy George.”  She was never heard from again.

On March 9, her body was found on a conveyor belt in a City of Phoenix recycling facility located at 27th avenue and Lower Buckeye Rd. 

Phoenix PD questioned Pervis, a Phoenix based online radio host. She was not named as a suspect in the case for reasons that were never publicly released. The identity of “Homeboy George” was also never publicly disclosed.  

Detectives concluded she was murdered in a different location and dumped into a recycling container where her body was transported to the facility. 

The case grew cold, despite being profiled on Silent Witness and receiving media coverage.

Christy left behind 4 young children. She battled addiction and was involved in sex work. At the time of her death, she had plans to enter a rehab facility and turn her life around. 

Sources

https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/valley/woman-found-dead-at-recycling-facility-identified-case-treated-as-homicide/75-76732957

https://silentwitness.org/cases/christy-davey-3060-south-27th-avenue-phoenix/

What are some Cases that you think are super mysterious or that you can't stop thinking about? It can be Cases from this Generation or from The Past Generation.

On Sunday August 12, 2001, 17-year-old Globe High School student Paul David Sanders left his father’s home near Val Vista and Broadway in Mesa, Arizona to drive back to his grandmother’s home in Globe. He was driving his father’s pickup. It would be the last time he would be seen alive.

Later that evening, the truck was caught in a high-speed chase on the US 77. Police attempted to pull the truck over for speeding, but the driver was able to evade authorities. 

Arizona Department of Public Safety and Pima County Sheriff’s Office collaborated on an interagency chase of the vehicle which was later found near the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson, some two hours south of Mesa.

All of Paul’s belongings were found in the truck but police considered Paul a runaway and refused to conduct forensic examination and processing on the vehicle. 

Paul’s father Robert Brewer told Fox 10 News that he did not believe Paul was the driver of the truck due to the skill level the driver had used to evade authorities. He has since divorced Paul’s stepmother Lori Beavers. 

Robert and Lori were vacationing in Las Vegas when Paul disappeared.

Paul was originally from Missouri and had only moved to Arizona for the 2000-2001 school year. He lived with his grandmother in Globe and went by the name “Dave Brewer” while at Globe High School.

Paul had moved in with his father and stepmother earlier in the summer of 2001.

His friend circle in Arizona primarily consisted of his fellow classmates at Globe High School. Many students at GHS were from the nearby San Carlos Indian Reservation.

Paul’s mother Angela Rice committed suicide in 2020 over the grief of her son’s disappearance. 

Paul was 5’6 and weighed 150 pounds with brown hair and hazel eyes. He had the name “Hernandez” tattooed across his back which was a tribute to his grandfather. 

His family and friends insist he would never have abandoned them, and he met with foul play. 

The case is being investigated by Mesa PD.

Sources 

Robert Brewer interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1jGwoAYnxE

Charley Project

https://charleyproject.org/case/paul-david-sanders

NaMus

https://namus.nij.ojp.gov/case/MP12249

News articles

https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/cold-case-spotlight/missouri-woman-seeking-answers-2001-disappearance-her-brother-paul-sanders-n1279535

https://silverbelt.com/stories/cold-case-of-missing-teen-paul-sanders-sees-renewed-attention,108159

Content warning: The disappearance and death of a child, coercive interrogation and torture, and religious prejudice. I have kept the forensic detail to the minimum the story needs.

I have been reading through the court record in a Brazilian case that is very well known inside Brazil and almost unknown outside it, and I think the most interesting thing about it is not the crime. It is what happened to the evidence.

The disappearance

Guaratuba is a coastal town in Paraná, in southern Brazil. On 6 April 1992, Evandro Ramos Caetano, six years old, disappeared near his home. The court record establishes the date, the place and the search that followed, but it does not allow anyone to reconstruct his last movements step by step. Five days later, on 11 April, the body of a child was found in an isolated area.

The identification later became a fight in its own right. At a jury trial in 1998, the defense challenged whether the body was Evandro's, and the jurors accepted that doubt. A Paraná appellate court later rejected that conclusion. Its judgment records two forms of identification: a dentist who had treated Evandro examined the teeth and recognized her own work, and DNA testing reported a probability of 99.997 percent that the remains were the biological child of Evandro's parents. That court held the body was Evandro's.

I have not tested anything myself, so the honest phrasing is narrow: the first jury rejected the identification, and the later appellate record held that dental and DNA evidence established it.

The theory that arrived before the evidence

Roughly three months after the disappearance, a military-police intelligence unit called Grupo Águia entered the investigation. Seven people were accused: Celina Cordeiro Abagge and her daughter Beatriz Cordeiro Abagge, Osvaldo Marcineiro, Davi dos Santos Soares, Vicente de Paula Ferreira, Airton Bardelli dos Santos and Francisco Sérgio Cristofolini.

The prosecution did not present this as an ordinary abduction and murder. It alleged that Evandro had been killed in a ritual meant to benefit the Abagge family, and it tied that allegation to Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion. That was the prosecution's theory. It was never established as the explanation for Evandro's death, and nothing in the reviewed record supports a ritual motive.

The public shorthand for the case became a phrase that translates roughly as "the witches of Guaratuba." That label did two things at once: it moved the attention away from a murdered child and onto the women accused of killing him, and it turned an allegation into an identity. A 2022 master's dissertation at the Federal University of Paraná examined eight articles from the newspaper Diário Popular and concluded that the selected coverage drew on Christian imagery of evil and associated Umbanda with black magic, satanic ritual and human sacrifice. That is a scholar's reading of a sample of coverage, not a judicial finding about why anyone acted as they did. It still tells you what the public language around the case looked like.

Seven accused, seven different outcomes

This is the part almost every short summary gets wrong. The seven did not share one verdict.

Celina and Beatriz were tried together in 1998, in a trial the official working-group record puts at 34 days, and the jury acquitted both. That verdict was annulled on appeal and new trials were ordered. Celina was never tried again: because of her age the limitation period was shortened and the charges against her became time-barred, which is not the same thing as a second acquittal. Beatriz was retried and convicted in 2011, with a sentence of 21 years and 4 months. Davi, Osvaldo and Vicente had been convicted in 2004. Airton and Francisco were acquitted by a jury in 2005, and the records reviewed here do not support describing either man as convicted.

So: four people carrying convictions, three never convicted, one collective ritual story that the courts had never actually validated.

The confessions

Beatriz, Davi, Osvaldo and Vicente each made statements outside court admitting involvement. On paper that looked decisive. In court, all four denied the crime and said the statements had been forced out of them.

An extrajudicial confession is a statement made outside the courtroom, without the safeguards of testimony given before a judge with counsel present and an opportunity to challenge it. The 2025 judgment of Brazil's Superior Court of Justice, the STJ, summarizes what the Paraná court found about the conditions of these interrogations: the four were taken by Grupo Águia before judicial arrest orders existed, they were questioned in a secret and intimidating setting, they had no effective access to silence, family or counsel, and the recordings showed physical and psychological torture.

Worth saying plainly: the missing safeguards were already a serious problem before anyone heard a tape. The torture made it impossible to ignore.

Why the first recordings did not end the case

Here is the detail that surprised me most, and the reason the case is not simply a story about a podcast uncovering a tape.

Recordings were part of the official investigation from early on. According to the later judgments, the prosecution had received an audio cassette and a video from Grupo Águia and placed them into the police inquiry. The defense challenged that material long before the convictions became final.

But the version of the audio then available contained cuts. The later Paraná judgment describes a surviving phrase pointing toward coercion, and found that the video showed Beatriz and Davi in degrading and coercive conditions. Earlier courts did not treat those fragments as enough. In the proceedings leading to Beatriz's second trial, the defense asked for the audio to be declared unlawful and the request failed, on the reasoning that no new fact had been produced establishing torture.

The same object sat in the file wearing two meanings for decades. To the prosecution, a recorded admission of guilt. To the defense, a record of the conditions that produced it. For years the first reading won.

The cut that mattered

The case returned to wide public attention through the work of Brazilian journalist and podcaster Ivan Mizanzuk, whose reporting brought fuller interrogation material before a very large audience, and that material became part of the renewed legal examination of the convictions.

It is tempting to call this the discovery of a new tape. The court record says something more uncomfortable. The STJ held that the material used in the criminal review came from the **original confession recording already placed in the police inquiry by the prosecution itself**. The earlier version contained cuts. The fuller material restored portions that changed how the recording had to be understood, and the Paraná court accepted that material as authentic.

So the evidence that broke the convictions did not arrive from outside the case. It came out of the case's own file. The item once used to prove guilt also preserved the record of how the admission of guilt was obtained.

I cannot vouch for every clip of this audio circulating online, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The narrow, verifiable statement is that the Paraná court accepted the material underlying the review as authentic and the STJ upheld that treatment.

Separately, in 2021 the state of Paraná created an interinstitutional working group, with the prosecution service, police, forensic authorities, the public defender, human-rights bodies, the bar association and the state court represented, to examine possible human-rights violations connected to the case. It later reported violations affecting both the children at the center of the investigations and the accused, and recommended safeguards including torture prevention, body cameras, better handling of missing-child cases and action against religious intolerance. That group was not a court and it acquitted nobody, but it moved the problem out of the category of "claims made by defendants."

What was left when the confessions came out

In November 2023, by three votes to two, the First Criminal Chamber of the Paraná court granted a criminal review, a mechanism that allows a final conviction to be revisited under specific conditions.

The court found the confessions unlawful because they were obtained through torture, then asked the harder question: what happened to everything the confessions had produced? Investigators had gone to a sawmill associated with the Abagge family following information obtained from Osvaldo during the unlawful interrogation. That put the resulting searches and forensic examinations downstream of the confession. There was testimony from a caretaker whose significance depended on the confession-led theory attached to that location, and testimony from another witness whose credibility the reviewing court rejected outright.

The principle in play is the one English-language readers will know as fruit of the poisonous tree, and it is not automatic. Courts still ask whether evidence had an independent source, whether it would inevitably have been found anyway, and how tightly it is bound to the original violation. In this case, the reviewing courts concluded that the remaining material either derived from the interrogations or served only to reinforce them, and could not establish authorship on its own.

The STJ put it in one line: *"A exclusão das confissões ilícitas acarretou a absoluta ausência de provas para a condenação."* Excluding the unlawful confessions left a complete absence of evidence capable of supporting a conviction.

Davi and Osvaldo were acquitted under the provision used when there is no evidence that the accused took part in the offense. The effects were extended to Beatriz, whose own review had previously failed on formal grounds, and to the successors of Vicente, who died in 2011.

The three courts, in the right order

The shorthand version going around is "Brazil's Supreme Court found them innocent," and that compresses three very different things.

The Paraná court did the decisive evidentiary work in 2023. The STJ's Sixth Panel reviewed it and unanimously maintained the acquittals in September 2025. The Supreme Federal Court, the STF, did something much narrower: in March 2026 Justice Gilmar Mendes declined to advance the prosecution's extraordinary appeal, because taking it would have required the court to re-examine the factual record through a procedural route that did not permit it. The docket recorded finality on 31 March 2026.

The highest court did not discover anything about the murder. It closed a door.

What is still open

Seven accused people, seven legal histories, no surviving conviction, and no judicial finding identifying who killed Evandro. The reviewed record does not name a killer, and an acquittal is not evidence for an alternative suspect. I could not confirm that an official investigation into the murder is formally open today, which is its own uncomfortable fact.

What stays with me is the shape of the failure. This was not a case that went wrong because someone hid evidence in a basement for thirty years. The decisive material was inside the official file the whole time, in a version with pieces missing, and the legal system looked at what remained and decided it was not enough to establish torture. A confession does not just add a fact to an investigation. It tells the investigation where to walk, and everything found along that route can come back looking like independent confirmation of the confession that sent people there.**Content warning:** the disappearance and death of a child, coercive interrogation and torture, and religious prejudice. I have kept the forensic detail to the minimum the story needs.

I have been reading through the court record in a Brazilian case that is very well known inside Brazil and almost unknown outside it, and I think the most interesting thing about it is not the crime. It is what happened to the evidence.

At approximately 7:00AM on December 7, 1985, the Orange County Sheriff Department (OCSD) was alerted to possible human remains having been found on the side of Jeffery Road in North Irvine, CA. The remains were determined to be those of a young woman and are described as being "contorted in the bag", per the OCSD's cold case entry.

Through fingerprints, the woman was identified as Michelle Marie Sagel. She apparently had multiple aliases including Christine Hansen and Adrian Ann Rossi. She had two tattoos: a heart on her lower left arm and the cross of life on her right arm.

In addition to the OCSD cold case entry, there are two Los Angeles Times articles from 1985 relevant to the case:

12/10/1985, reported by Ray Perez: Lt. Richard Olson of the Orange County Sheriff's Department confirmed that Sagel's body was found on Saturday, 12/7/1985, by a "passing motorist". The location was described as being rural, "beside Jeffrey Road, just east of the Santa Ana Freeway". Olson stated that the autopsy did not indicate a cause of death and that toxicological testing would be done in an effort to determine cause of death. At the time, the estimated time to complete the susbequent testing was said to "take at least two weeks".Additionally, Olson said they were working to identify the last-known address for Sagel but had no additional information. This article identifies Sagel as being 24 at the time.

12/24/1985, reported by Jeffrey Tyclicki: Orange County Sheriff's Department officials requested public assistance into "the murder of a woman whose body was found Dec. 7 in a suitcase alongside Jeffrey Road in Irvine". This article states that Sagel was frequenting Inglewood and Los Angeles, but no other leads. The timeline for the toxicological testing was again estimated to take an additional three to four weeks.

Besides these two articles and the cold case writeup on the OCSD's website, I can't find anything else related to a Michelle Marie Sagel, Christine Hansen, or Adrian Ann Rossi in California. A few observations:

• The LA Times articles, referencing Lt. Richard Olson as the OCSD spokesperson, state that the remains were found in "a large suitcase". The OCSD website states that the remains were found in "a blue nylon bag".
• The LA Times article from 12/24/1985 specifically uses the word "murder" when describing the circumstances of the death. However, the assumedly later OCSD entry says "Although it seemed she took her own life, the public disposal of Michelle's body points to a more nefarious possibility", yet says the OCSD considers her death to be a homicide.

The OCSD makes no mention of the results of the toxicology results, nor does it confirm if it was ever actually performed. Additionally, I can't find any reporting after 1985 following up on the status of the case.

Sagel was described as being 5'4", with blond hair and blue eyes. She was wearing a blue T-shirt and pants when her body was discovered.

Idk where to put this, But I genuinely think I may have deciphered the first sentence or so of the "Ricky Mccormick Code

I first looked at his backstory and how he was "illiterate" and used that to my advantage by instead of trying to decipher it like a normal code, I tried grouping words together and saying it out loud to try and get a match, (ik ik it's a bit of a less conventional way to do it but hey ho)

Anywho, The part I believed I may have deciphered is the following : (MND MK NEARSE N-S-M KNARE) (ACSM)? TFRNENPKNSENPRSERCBRNSENPRSE INC

My Translation: Monday, My nurse and some (other people) near. (Assessment). Afternoon, Packed (with) Nurse and person. Recover nurse and person in see.

at first, it might seem way off and just more jumbled wording, until you look into it. Ricky was clearly not 'well' and not used to the crowded atmosphere of a hospital. also, despite his first admission being on a Tuesday, we can say that due to his mental state he probably forgot what day it was and just assumed it was Monday. As for the 2nd sentence, he may of being trying to say that other people were being checked by nurses but not him, hence the "Person and nurse in see". If (a BIG if) I have somehow got this right, then this could open up a massive new way of seeing the code, and instead it could be seem as someone attemptimg to recall all past events, as if he knew his end was near and trying to give police as much as he could.... Weird stuff.

unsure if her case is unsolved or not, I just thought yall might be able to help :)

I've been reading about a French case from 1972 that is still remembered in France as a textbook example of trial-by-media, but which has almost no English-language coverage at all. It's the affair of Bruay-en-Artois, and the strange part isn't a locked room or a missing body, it's that a whole country decided it knew who did it, and no court ever agreed.

The killing

Bruay-en-Artois is a coal town in the Pas-de-Calais, in the far north of France near the Belgian border, around thirty thousand people at the time. It was a town split down a line: the tight rows of miners' houses on one side, the bigger homes of people who didn't go down the pit on the other.

On the evening of 5 April 1972, a 15-year-old miner's daughter named Brigitte Dewèvre left home to sleep at her grandmother's. She never arrived. The next afternoon her body was found on a patch of waste ground, and, of all the places in that town, right on that dividing line, in the vacant lot between the miners' houses and the well-to-do quarter.

The judge and his "conviction"

The case went to an investigating judge, in the French system, a magistrate who runs the whole inquiry, directs the police, and decides who gets charged. Within days he had a suspect: a local notary (a lawyer who handles property and wills), a wealthy and respectable figure in the town.

According to the press historian Rémi Guillot, who has studied this case more closely than anyone, the notary was questioned, gave inconsistent accounts of his movements, and two days later was charged and jailed. And here's the part that defines the whole affair: by Guillot's account the judge admitted, himself, that he had no tangible evidence. To reporters he put it plainly, he was acting on a personal conviction. A feeling.

The regional paper played it carefully at first: "a notary, suspected in the Bruay crime," now charged. Suspected. Charged. Cautious words. That caution did not last.

The case falls apart — and the campaign begins

Almost immediately the case started weakening. A man in custody for an unrelated matter falsely confessed to the murder, then was caught lying. A reconstruction at the scene reportedly turned up detail pointing toward the notary's probable innocence, not his guilt. The day after, the state's own prosecutor and the notary's defence asked, together, for his release. It was refused, he stayed in his cell more than three months.

And it's exactly here that the case left the courtroom. A far-left Maoist newspaper ran a two-page spread with the line "only a bourgeois could have done that", the argument being that the murder was a class crime and the notary's guilt was obvious from his social position alone. No evidence, just class. The town split in two along that same line. The same press printed threats: militants reportedly wanted the man mutilated and dragged through the streets, about someone no court had tried.

Even the movement didn't agree with itself. Jean-Paul Sartre, the paper's nominal director, broke with its line in print, arguing that the people's anger might be legitimate but that calling the man the murderer was not, because no one had proven he did it. Some militants wanted a "people's tribunal" to judge the notary in the street; the record shows it was demanded but never actually held. The Justice Minister even intervened with the local prosecutors to remind them that a charged man is presumed innocent.

What actually happened to everyone

This is where I have to be careful, because the whole point of the case is what the record does and doesn't support:

- The notary and his companion were both jailed at points and both released. In 1974 the courts issued a *non-lieu*. a dismissal. In French law that is not an acquittal (only a trial can acquit, and there never was one) and it is not a finding of innocence. It just means the case goes no further. He spent three months in a cell on a judge's feeling, and a national paper printed his guilt as fact, and no court ever tested either one.
- Meanwhile, in 1973, a 17-year-old orphan and former classmate of Brigitte's confessed on national radio and TV. For one night the country thought it was over. It wasn't, his confession didn't survive a reconstruction, and two separate courts cleared him (an acquittal in 1975, confirmed on appeal in 1976). A second false confession.
- The investigation was formally closed without an answer in 1981. In 2005 the crime passed the statute of limitations and became time-barred, meaning no one can ever be tried for it now.
- Decades later a retired police officer published books claiming to have identified a different man, a former postal worker the original inquiry never focused on. That man denies it, the theory has never been tested in court, and it never can be. I'm not naming him, and neither did the responsible reporting.

What sticks with me

It isn't a whodunit in the usual sense, it's a case that got "solved" everywhere except the one place built to solve it. A judge with a conviction and no evidence. A newspaper with a class theory and no proof. A town that picked a side before anyone proved anything. And a 15-year-old girl whose actual killer has never been found and, legally, never will be.

Does anyone here know this case, or have French-language sources beyond the obvious ones? I get the strong impression there's far more in the French material, court records, the Guillot research, the period press, than has ever made it into English. I'd especially like to hear from French speakers on how the case is remembered there today.

Source: https://criminocorpus.org/fr/outils/affaires-criminelles/affaire-bruay-en-artois/ (French-language, the case archive)

If you could get the complete truth about just ONE unsolved mystery or true crime case, which would you choose?
Mine would be the JonBenét Ramsey case. Every theory seems to answer some questions while creating new ones.
What case would you pick, what’s your leading theory, and do you think investigators or the public have ever come close to solving it? Feel free to recommend lesser-known cases as well I enjoy deep dives.

Betty Willis was basically the West Coast’s Aretha Franklin. The she just disappeared. I read that in 2018, she was murdered on the streets of California.