Natasha Leigh

Vanishing without a trace is seemingly impossible but the Springfield Three have been missing for 30 years without any solid leads. Sherrill Levitt was 47 at the time of her disappearance. She had just bought her dream home in a nice and relatively safe part of Springfield, Missouri. In an interview later in time as being a “pretty fierce lady, she didn’t do a lot of half measures in her life”. Sherrill’s daughter Suzie Streeter was 19 at the time. She had dreams of following in her mother’s footsteps in being a successful hairdresser. Her friend described Suzie as very outgoing, fun and just a happy person, she was a creature of habit to an “almost OCD to some degree”. Her friend would tease her about where she would park her car in the driveway since it was always the same. Suzie’s good friend Stacy McCall was 18 at the time of the case. She wanted to attend Missouri University after high school. Her mom would describe her as funny and bubbly, she said that the family ...

Not showing up to a doctor’s appointment leads to the discovery of pure savagery committed against a 23-year-old university student.  Katarzyna Zowada, born June 1st 1975, was, as friends described, a “nice but sad and withdrawn” person. She was studying at Jagiellonian University near Kraków, Poland, Katarzyna had tried two other fields before finally deciding on Religious Studies. Sadly, Katarzyna had been suffering from depression for the last two years of her life and was in the process of treating the mental illness with help from doctors. On the day of her disappearance, November 12th 1998, Katarzyna was on the way to one of her many doctor’s appointments at the Psychiatric Clinic in Nowa Huta. She never made it to the appointment. Her mother had been at the clinic waiting for Katarzyna to arrive but quickly realized something was wrong, she reported Katarzyna missing at the local police station. There the police told her that she would have to wait. Months woul...

Taking a routine bike ride is a perfect way to exercise but sometimes those trips end with disaster. 19-year-old Tara Calico was one of those people that loved to go on a daily bike ride on the New Mexico State Road 47. She would follow the same path, occasionally she would be joined by her mother, Patty Doel. Patty decided to stop going with her daughter on the bike rides after a car began driving aggressively at them, aiming mostly at her. She has said the situation made her feel stalked. After the incident, Patty told Tara that if she continued to go on the bike rides that she should at the very least carry mace. Tara refused and continued to go on trips. On September 20th 1988, Tara went on her bike ride leaving at 9:30 in the morning. She had told her mother that she needed to be back home by noon as she was going to play tennis with her boyfriend at 12:30. Tara asked Patty to fetch her if she didn’t make it back by noon. As her daughter requested, Patty went out on h...

A dog brought home a bone that led to the discovery of a murdered girl and an unsolved case riddled with false accusations.   On September 19th 1972 in Springfield, New Jersey a dog took itself out into the woods, only to return with a ‘large bone’. As most dogs do, the little friend was laid in the front yard of its apartment building, playing with the bone. The owner noticed her dog playing and went to check on them, making sure nothing was wrong. She screamed when she realised that what she thought was simply a bone was actually a human forearm. She called the police instantly. When the attending officers arrived she led them around to the back door of her apartment. There she handed over a bluish bag with a lower left arm that the attending officer noted as having ‘off-whitish nail polish’. Search parties went out into the Houdille Quarry just behind the building, trying to find where the dog could have gotten a human limb. That same day the search parties found t...

Mother’s intuition was once again proved true when after being told her 10-day-old baby died in a house fire was found alive, healthy and happy 6 years later.   In the winter of 1997, Luz Cuevas awoke to the smell of smoke in her home and began to frantically search for her newborn. When she went into the nursery, Delimar was no longer in her crib and the window was left wide open. Firefighters had to physically remove Luz from her home with burns on her face. The entire time she was screaming that her baby had been stolen. Investigators later deemed the reaction to be from a bad case of “nerves” and they would tell the world that Delimar had been incinerated in the blaze that destroyed the home. Luz never gave up hope, fighting to continue searching for her daughter. She was adamant that there had been foul play since she wouldn’t have ever left the window open on a cold, winter’s night and she could clearly remember seeing an empty cot long before the flames reach...

 A child is normally described as innocent and sweet but Mary Bell was anything but that. Before her 13th birthday, she was arrested for murder.  Mary Bell was born on the 26th of May 1957 in Northumberland, England to a 17-year-old Elizabeth McCrickett and an unknown man. It is possible that Elizabeth got pregnant whilst she was working as she was a fairly well-known prostitute in the town. Mary’s aunt said that when Mary was born that Elizabeth was furious with the hospital staff when they tried to initiate the first touch between mother and baby. Elizabeth is said to have screamed at the staff “take that thing away from me!” The family lived in Newcastle upon Tyne, which during the sixties had an urban renewal program that had houses marked for demolition and left the family that called the building home waiting on the council to rehome them. Kids would play on and around the work sites and on derelict houses that were barely cleared of the rubble by construc...

Life in the attic of the home his lover lived in with her husband was calm but one night an argument led to a murder. It all started with Walburga ‘Dolly’ Korschel. Born in 1880, she grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in a community of German immigrants. By the age of 12, Dolly had started working at Fred Oesterreich’s textile mill. Workers there described her as highly charismatic and attractive with many friends. Dolly very quickly attracted the attention of Fred and by the time Dolly was 17 she was married to her boss. Despite being the boss’s wife, Dolly continued to be close with the workers, settling disputes and acting as the messenger for the employees and Fred. Yet, there were still rumours that 17-year-old Dolly was having affairs since the beginning of her marriage. Years later in 1913 when Dolly was 33 she needed her sewing machine repaired, this was how she would meet Otto Sanhuber. Dolly invited the 17-year-old into the home she shared with Fred and the affair ...

Finding out that 23 years of life has been a lie and that the woman who raised you is your kidnapper is truly horrific but it is the life Carlina White lived. Joy White was 16 when she found out that she was pregnant with her baby girl. Her healthy mix of fear and excitement was shared with her boyfriend Carl Tyson. On July 15th 1987, Carlina White was born, her name in honour of her father. Just 20 days later and Carlina was rushed back to the hospital with a dangerously high fever of 104°F (40°C). Doctors quickly found out that Carlina had gotten an infection after swallowing some fluids during birth. She was given antibiotics and had to stay at the hospital until her fever came down. Joy, distraught over the news, broke down in the hospital halls when a woman in white walked over to her and Carl. The woman was wearing all white, similar to a nurse’s uniform, and began comforting the couple. She’s later quoted as telling Joy a strange thing before they parted ways. “T...

The first woman to be executed in New Zealand was found guilty of a horrendous crime but she wasn’t charged for all her crimes. In Greenock, Scotland railway engineer John McCulloch and his wife Elizabeth Swan had their daughter Williamina ‘Minnie’ Dean on September 2nd 1844. Shortly into Minnie’s life, her mother passed away from cancer in 1857, after that not much else is known about Minnie or her family’s life. The next thing documented is Minnie Dean living in Invercargill, New Zealand with two young children in the early 1860s. It is unknown how she arrived or who the father of the children was but according to the story that Minnie was sharing her husband was a Tasmanian doctor who passed away before she moved to Invercargill. The next notable thing in Minnie’s life was marrying innkeeper, James Dean in 1872. For a while they lived in Etal Creek, a hotspot between Riverton and Otago goldfields, using the gold rush to their advantage. But when the gold dried out, so ...