Three Unsolved Mysteries You Might Not Have Heard Of
By: The True Crime Times
Tags: True Crime, Missing Persons, Unsolved Mysteries, Crime, Cold Case

I’ve been writing this blog long enough to know that people love reading about well-known, unsolved cases. But there are thousands of unsolved cases that either never get much media attention or they’ve gone cold, and those are equally important. Today, we will examine three unsolved mysteries you might not have heard of.

The Brutal Murder of Peggy Reber

Peggy Reber

In 1968, Lebanon, Pennsylvania, resident Peggy Reber was just 14 years old. She lived in a run-down apartment building with her mother, Mary Reber, in a section of town known for its higher-than-average crime rate. The building was so notorious for its sketchy tenants that it earned itself the nickname, the “House of Broken Hearts.”

Mary Reber wasn’t the most attentive mother, nor was she the best role model. She was known for her drinking and partying, and she was rumored to have been involved in prostitution. Mary was also known for the succession of boyfriends she brought in and out of her home.

Young Peggy grew up without any trusted authority figures and was often left to fend for herself in the apartment without food or electricity. At 14, she had already become sexually active and had a 19-year-old boyfriend. She had missed 30 days of school that year, as well. Child protective services had an open file on the Reber family but Peggy had never been removed from the home.

Peggy had a sister, but she married at age 14 and had moved out of the apartment to live with her husband. Peggy had no one to lean on but herself.

On the night of May 24, 1968, Mary was on a weekend trip with friends to Atlantic City, New Jersey. She left Peggy home alone, as usual. The following morning, when she arrived home, she found what she thought was someone sleeping on the floor of one of the bedrooms. She immediately assumed it was some passed-out drunk using her apartment as a crash pad, which was not uncommon.

Oddly, the power to the whole building had been cut off, so Mary wasn’t able to make out any details of the person on the floor because it was so dark. She went across the hall and asked a neighbor to help her get the person up and out of her apartment.

It was at this point that Mary and her neighbor realized that the person on the floor wasn’t a drunk stranger. It was Peggy, and she was dead. And her death had been a horrific one.

Peggy had been beaten and bitten on her upper body. She had been strangled, but there are varying accounts of what she was strangled with — either an electrical cord or a scarf. The teen had been sodomized with something, but again, what was used depends on who you talk to. It was either a mop handle or a jar. She had also been sodomized with an archer’s bow, which was used to penetrate her with such force that the tip was found protruding from her upper chest.

Most of Peggy’s left nipple had been bitten off, and the child’s eyes were open, almost bulging out, her mother recalled.

According to the book Justice Denied: The Unsolved Murder of Peggy Reber, the archer’s bow had been shoved into Peggy’s rectum no less than 16 times, puncturing her heart 5 times in the process and wounding all of her lower internal organs. [1]

Any opportunity to properly investigate the murder was already gone, as the crime scene was so contaminated that any evidence collected was practically useless, Cliff Roland shared with Philadelphia Weekly in 2008. Roland was chief of detectives with the Lebanon Police Department in 1968.

Roland said:

So many people were walking around, touching things, moving things, walking in her blood… Peggy’s naked body had been covered with a blanket from the bed. It was so confusing.

Cliff Rowland and Mary Reber discuss Peggy’s murder.

The walls of the apartment building at 770 Maple St. were paper-thin, making it unlikely that no one heard the attack on Peggy. Yet, no one volunteered information and few were willing to speak with investigators when asked to. The district attorney at the time tried to circumvent this problem by mailing letters to all the tenants promising them anonymity in exchange for information.

One person eventually came forward — an individual who was sitting on her front porch only a couple of hundred feet away from the Rebers’ apartment. She told investigators that she saw a man named Arthur Root on the fire escape on the day of the murder. The witness recognized him because he had recently burglarized a laundromat she owned.

Root, 27, was a petty thief and who had been in and out of jail in three separate counties over a span of 15 years.

Another witness, insurance salesman Marlin Jones, worked with the police to produce a composite sketch of a man he claimed he saw at the Maple Leaf Apartments on the day of the murder. Two weeks later, he committed suicide, leading many to believe he was the murderer.

The circumstances surrounding Jones’ suicide have been described as “bizarre”:

Two weeks after Peggy’s murder, a tip came into police about a suicide note Jones had written before driving up to Fort Indiantown Gap Military Reservation nestled in the Blue Mountains.

Two police officers traveled to the reservation, where they found Jones standing next to his car. The officers turned away just long enough for Jones to enter the vehicle, grab a gun, and shoot himself in the head.

In his suicide note, Jones admitted to stealing money from his clients but made no mention of Peggy’s murder. For this reason, Roland was not convinced that Jones’s suicide had anything to do with Peggy’s murder.

However, none of the actual tenants came forward with any useful information, which is common after a violent crime. No one wants to start talking only to wind up dead themselves. Sometimes, people don’t speak up because they’re protecting someone.

Then there was a man named Morris Purcell, who Cliff Roland always believed was involved in Peggy’s killing.

Purcell was a Vietnam vet and a patient at the Lebanon Veteran’s Administration Hospital. Purcell was arrested on robbery charges and hanged himself while in custody at the Lebanon County Prison.

He might not have intended to kill himself, though; before the hanging, Purcell pulled down his pants and had an erection. He may have accidentally died during autoerotic asphyxiation. Either that or being locked in a cage really turned him on.

But, Roland said, if Purcell was involved in the murder, he wasn’t the sole perpetrator.

In the end, Arthur Root was prosecuted and stood trial for Peggy Reber’s murder in February 1970, but he was acquitted. His defense team successfully cast doubt about the time of the murder and the reliability of forensic evidence that the prosecution used to link Root to the murder.

In 2009, a grand jury that took a second look at the case issued a report finding no probable cause to charge anyone with Peggy’s murder.

Almost 52 years later, the case remains unsolved and it has gone as cold as ice.

The Disappearance of Amy Billig

On March 5, 1974, 17-year-old Amy Billig did what many young people did in the 1970s: She decided to hitch-hike.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when children rode their bikes all over town and people stuck out their thumb for a ride without much fear for their safety. Those days are long gone.

Amy went missing near her Coconut Grove, Florida, home while on her way to visit her father’s art gallery in the Grove. She planned to borrow money from him so she could meet friends later in the day. She never arrived at her dad’s office and she never met up with her friends that evening.

Some witnesses claim she accepted a ride from a biker, while others say she got into a van or pickup truck. The last people to see her were construction workers in her neighborhood.

Amy — or her abductor — left pieces of evidence all over the state of Florida, including her camera along the Florida Turnpike in Central Florida, and her hairbrush in Kissimmee.

Sadly, people would taunt Amy’s parents, Ned and Susan Billig, for many years.

Twin brothers Charles and Larry Glasser, 16, phoned Amy’s family a few days after her disappearance and claimed to have kidnapped Amy. They said they were holding her for $30,000 ransom. The brothers were lying, however, and were charged with extortion.

As the Billigs investigated their daughter’s disappearance, they began receiving a mountain of tips from people alleging that Amy had been kidnapped by one of two biker gangs, either the Pagans or the Outlaws. Both gangs frequently traveled through the Coconut Grove area in 1974. Amy may have used the aliases “Mute,” “Sunshine,” “Little Bits,” and/or “Mellow Sheryl” while with the bikers, callers claimed.

Some so-called “witnesses” told the Billigs that Amy was still alive. Some claimed she had been killed. The Billig family crisscrossed the United States in search of their child and even searched for her in Great Britain. All roads led to nowhere.

In the late 1970s, Paul Branch, a member of the Pagans, said that Amy was alive and that she was being held by the Pagans. However, according to his widow, Branch recanted this claim while on his deathbed in the late 1990s. He then claimed that Amy died of a drug overdose while attending a party thrown by the Pagans on the night of her disappearance. Her body was allegedly taken to the Florida Everglades by gang members who fed it to alligators. Paul’s widow passed this information along to Susan.

Indeed, the stretch of road where Amy Billig’s camera was found was a common route for biker gangs. Unfortunately, when the film was developed, it revealed few clues as to her whereabouts or what happened the day she disappeared.

One caller told the Billigs that Amy had been abducted by members of an illicit sex ring and was being held captive. This sick individual would continue to taunt the Billig family for 21 years, calling and Amy’s parents that he had trained their daughter as a sex slave and that time was running out to save her. He would say that he wanted Susan, too. At one point, the caller told Susan Billig that she would be abducted like her daughter and sold into a slave trade. In another message, the caller told her she only had two weeks to live.

Finally, in 1995, FBI agents were able to trace one of the calls to a cellphone used by a man named Henry Johnson Blair. Previously, Henry only used payphones to place the calls, which made it impossible for the police to apprehend him.

Henry Johnson Blair

Henry was a married father of two and a decorated 24-year veteran of the U.S. Customs Service, a special agent who oversees drug interdiction at the Port of Miami and on the Miami River. He was convicted of three counts of aggravated stalking and sentenced to two years in prison. Susan Billig also settled a lawsuit against him for $5 million.

Blair’s defense was that he was an alcoholic with an obsessive-compulsive disorder that caused him to stalk and harass the Billig family for more than two decades.

It’s possible that Amy ran away with no intention of returning home, and Henry Blair may have played a role in her disappearance. Susan discovered a journal written by her daughter in which she wrote about plans of running away to South America with a man named “Hank.” A photo developed from the roll of film inside Amy’s camera showed a white van that was identical to a van Henry drove in 1974. Moreover,Blair’s job required him to relocate to South America around the time Amy specified in her journal. However, there has been no evidence linking Blair to Amy’s disappearance.

Susan Billig — Source: Miami Herald

Jack Calvar, the lead detective in the case, said in 1998 that he finally had some answers in the disappearance of Amy Billig. Paul Branch’s story about her body being dumped in the Everglades was true, he said, but there was more to the story than a simple drug overdose. She had been taken by members of the Pagans motorcycle gang, drugged, raped, murdered, and used for alligator food.

Calvar said Branch shared dozens of details with him that only someone intimately familiar with the case would know.

However, law enforcement, in general, strongly doubts Branch’s widow’s statements, saying they believe she was lying in order to profit off of the notoriety of Amy’s disappearance.

Amy Billig has never been found. Her father died from lung cancer in 1993, and her mother passed away in 2005, also from lung cancer. They were never able to lay their daughter to rest or to bring her killer to justice.

The Murder of Georgette Bauerdorf

Georgette Bauerdorf — Source: The Lineup

Young socialite Georgette Bauerdorf lost her life in 1944 in a brutal rape and murder that left Hollywood in shock.

Life up until that point had been good to Georgette. She was the heir to an oil tycoon and led a life of privilege.

When Georgette graduated from high school in 1941, she moved to West Hollywood to pursue an acting career. At the age of 20, she started working at the Los Angeles Times in the Women’s Service Bureau and at the Hollywood Canteen, where she served young soldiers who visited the canteen to eat, drink, and dance. When she wasn’t working, she spent her nights out on the town, schmoozing with celebrities and the many men who took a romantic interest in her.

The Hollywood Canteen — Source: HollywoodCanteen.net

October 11, 1944, was a Wednesday, and Georgette spent the day at work. At the end of her shift, she got into her sister’s Pontiac coupe and the two drove home. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

The next morning, Georgette’s maid and a janitor arrived around 11 a.m. to clean her apartment. They discovered Georgette’s lifeless body, still clad in a pajama top, facedown in the bathtub with the water still running. She had been raped and strangled to death. She was attacked with such brutality that her killer left fingerprints all over her body and a washrag had been shoved into her mouth to silence her.

Georgette’s body was bruised, suggesting she fought back against her attacker, but there were no signs of struggle in the bathroom. The only sign that something was amiss was a partially unscrewed lightbulb outside her front door which led investigators to believe that Georgette’s killer waited for her in the darkness, possibly even entering the apartment before Georgette got home from work.

A small amount of cash was missing, but nothing else had been taken — not even a collection of jewelry left sitting out in the open. For this reason, investigators didn’t believe that the murder was the result of a botched robbery.

Police put together a timeline of what transpired that night: Georgette arrived home late, ate a snack in the kitchen, and then was murdered. What investigators couldn’t tease out was whether she was killed by a stranger or by someone she knew.

Around 2:30 a.m., a downstairs neighbor heard someone shouting, “Stop! You’re killing me!” But the neighbor assumed it was a domestic dispute and went back to bed.

The janitor reported hearing the sounds of high-heeled footsteps in Georgette’s apartment, followed by a loud crash — as if something had been dropped. He could not confirm that a second person was in the apartment, however.

Days after Georgette’s murder, police received a letter from Sergeant Gordon Aadland claiming that a woman matching Georgette’s description gave him a ride through Hollywood on the night of October 11. The sergeant said the woman appeared nervous, but he downplayed that claim later on.

After the murder, Georgette’s killer left in her car and it was later found abandoned with an empty gas tank. That’s where the trail went cold.

Over the years, people have linked Georgette’s murder to the death of Elizabeth Short, better known as the “Black Dahlia.” It is theorized that the same man killed both women, and that the man in question was named Jack Anderson Wilson. In fact, the two women had met at the Hollywood Canteen. Still, there is no solid evidence linking the murders.

Elizabeth Short, a.k.a., the Black Dahlia — Source: Biography.com

Georgette frequently got dressed with the curtains open, and another theory is that her killer had been watching her for a long period of time and decided to attack her after watching her undress that night. But, again, there was no evidence to support this theory.

One man, John Lehman Sumter, confessed to killing Georgette, but his confession proved to be false. He was quite mentally ill and had spent time in a psychiatric hospital before the murder. There was no evidence to support his claims, and his confession was inconsistent with the little evidence the police had gathered.

It wasn’t uncommon for Georgette to give the uniformed men at the Hollywood Canteen a ride in her car, so law enforcement began looking into the possibility that one of them may have been the culprit. The police questioned both a soldier and a sailor who had been at the Canteen on the night Georgette was murdered. Witnesses reported seeing the soldier bugging Georgette to dance with him, and one of Georgette’s friends reported that Georgette told her she agreed to dance with him to get him to leave her alone. The police were unable to link either man to the crime, so both were released.

That same friend also told the police that Georgette had secretly been planning a trip to El Paso to meet her boyfriend, “Jerry.” Investigators found plane tickets to El Paso on Georgette’s dresser, and “Jerry” was later found to be a man named Jerome M. Brown, an antiaircraft artillery trainee who had met Georgette on the 13th of June atthe Hollywood Canteen. He stated that the two had exchanged letters and that Georgette was scheduled to come visit him before the murder. He, too, was ruled out as a suspect.

Then, in 1945, a note was discovered that police believed to be from the killer. It read:

“To the Police — Between now and Oct. 11, the one who murdered Georgette Bauerdorf will appear at the Hollywood Canteen. The murderer will be in uniform. He has, since he committed the murder, been in action at Okinawa. The Murder of Georgette Bauerdorf was divine retribution. Let the Los Angeles police arrest the murderer, if they can.”

Of course, the killer never appeared and almost 76 years later, Georgette’s murder remains unsolved and it is likely to stay that way.

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