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The 1988-1993 logo.
Join me. Perhaps you may be able to help solve a mystery.
—Robert Stack's intro for the first few seasons.
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This TV show ran from 1987-2002 and was hosted for most of its run (which Channel Hopped from NBC to CBS and then Lifetime, and was also seen in Canada in syndication before moving to CTV) by Robert Stack. It was revived in 2008 on Spike TV and was hosted by Dennis Farina. Netflix also remooted the series in 2019, and as of very late 2024, there have been five short seasons.
As the show's name implies, this series delves into a variety of mysteries, showing dramatic re-enactments of each. They can range from true crime stories to typical missing persons cases and stories of lost loved ones to the paranormal: ghost stories, UFO's, the Loch Ness Monster, and all that good stuff.
Although it's presented like a piece of fiction, most every mystery is real. In fact, roughly 400 of this show's mysteries have been solved. It is believed to have originally directly competed with America's Most Wanted. Both versions of the show have a telephone hotline set up that you can call if you have any information, while the current version only has a website. And some of the mysteries presented back then are still being solved to this day.
It has been streamed for free on Pluto TV and YouTube thanks to FilmRise, although the episodes have been edited to some degree, including some segments being cut completely.
These are true tropes, from the files of TV Tropes.org:[]
- Abusive Parents: Taken up to eleven in the case of Sharon Stevens, whose father regularly beat her savagely with a belt buckle - which, ironically, she had given him as a Christmas gift. She found a kinder environment with her foster parents, with whom she was reunited thanks to the show.
- Against My Religion: Investigators regarding the 1986 murder of New York yeshiva student Chaim Weiss were frustratedly unable to get his classmates to name anyone who might have had a motive to kill him, since Orthodox Judaism forbids anyone to voice such suspicion without concrete proof. Nearly 40 years later, the murder is sadly still unsolved.
- Animal Cruelty is Just Wrong: A Missouri woman ran a kennel for abandoned and unwanted dogs, which burned down in a fire determined to be deliberately set, killing all but one of the dogs. The perpetrator was never caught and the kennel's owner passed away without ever seeing justice served.
- The Satanic cult alleged to be involved in the Son of Sam murders (of which David Berkowitz was a member) regularly sacrificed German shepherds. A mass canine grave was even unearthed in the park where the cult held its meetings.
- Arranged Marriage: Alice Arruda and David Vieira were engaged for five years before they ever met, and communicated only by letters during that time (never even talking on the phone). When David turned out to be a jealous and abusive husband, Alice defied her family's old-world Portuguese values and left him, which resulted in him bludgeoning and stabbing her to death and evading justice for six years.
- The Bad Guys Are Cops: Sadly this was true in several stories. In the Anna Anton case, the murderer was actually the Chief of Police. Cops were even suspected of turning on their own, as in the Steve Sandlin case (which police alleged was a suicide).
- Bait-and-Switch Credits: Some of the cases shown during the "solved" montage during the opening credits were not; in fact, some (among them the case listed under Animal Cruelty Is Just Wrong above) are still unsolved today. Some of them were even segments profiled under "The Unexplained" (for example: the ghosts in the St. James Hotel), which by their definition will never be fully resolved.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: One story dealing with the murder of Cash Box magazine's (a now-defunct music industry publication, similar to Billboard) Country chart director speculated that he may have been killed for refusing to participate in a chart fixing scheme. Eventually, it turned out that this was exactly what had happened, and that the person who ordered the hit was none other than one of the victim's superiors who had been interviewed for the UM segment and had nothing but positive things to say about the man whose death he had ordered. The mastermind had already passed away by the time this came to light, but the hit man was caught and sent to prison.
- Catch Phrase: "This program is about unsolved mysteries. Whenever possible, the actual family members and police officials have participated in recreating the events. What you are about to see is not a news broadcast."
- "Join me. Perhaps maybe you can help solve a mystery!"
- "For every mystery there is someone, somewhere who knows the truth. Perhaps that someone is watching. Perhaps... it's you."
- Cool Old Guy: Robert Stack, and how.
- Cool Teacher: One story involved a woman looking for her middle-school music teacher, whom she credited with broadening her cultural horizons and augmenting her self-esteem. Sadly, she had encountered the teacher several years earlier, but, due to suffering from amnesia, didn't recognize her.
- Department of Child Disservices: From the family court judge who returned a teenage girl to the custody of the father who was sexually abusing her to the judge who conspired with infamous "baby broker" Georgia Tann (and was forced to resign as a result), the ways in which the authorities have failed or victimized children are often truly sickening.
- Department of Redundancy Department: Technically, all mysteries are unsolved by the very definition of the word. But a program called simply "Mysteries" wouldn't sound quite as flashy.
- Disproportionate Retribution: The Lee Selwyn case involved one of Selwyn's biker friends confronting a motorist who had purposely tried to run the bikers off the road and smashing his car window. In retaliation, the motorist murdered Selwyn, who had not even been involved in the altercation, by running him off the road and into a utility pole.
- Downer Ending: Some mysteries, very often those in which a missing person's body was found. Honorable mention also to "Lost Loves" cases in which the person being searched for is revealed to have died years earlier.
- Faking the Dead: Some criminals were revealed to have faked their own deaths in order to get away with their crimes. One of the more bizarre stories was that of Clarence Roberts, in which his dead body was identified twice by authorities after fires ten years apart. Investigators believe he probably murdered a vagrant in the first fire and tried to pass off the corpse as his own so his wife could live comfortably on his life insurance, and that he died for real (possibly by accident, along with his wife, whom he intended to murder) in the second fire. Some, however, remained convinced that Roberts faked his own death twice and was still alive somewhere.
- Foreshadowing: Could get downright creepy at times, especially if it involved a murder victim seeming to foresee their own demise. An example is the still-unsolved 1989 murder of Maryland teen Tracey Kirkpatrick, whose favorite poem had been Christina Rossetti's "Remember," in which the narrator implores her loved ones to remember her with a smile, and not tears, after she is gone. The poem was inscribed on Tracey's headstone. Another story involved a teenage girl who was convinced she would die before age 16. She lived to her 16th birthday, but not much longer, as she was abducted and murdered shortly afterward.
- Heroic Pet Story: A handful of stories dealt with pets who had saved their owners in medical emergencies, often through some uncanny ability to recognize when their owners were in distress. These included a dog who could predict when his owner was about to have a seizure and helped get her to a safe place, and a pot-bellied pig who ran for help when her owner was having a heart attack.
- Hey, It's That Guy!: Believe it or not, Robert Stack had a TON of acting credits to his credit LONG before this show began. One of his more notable roles was in Airplane!
- And The Untouchables TV series (alluded to in the segments dealing with Eliot Ness, whom Stack played on that show). And Ultra Magnus's voice in the Transformers's 86 movie. And...
- Matthew McConaughey infamously had a role in one segment.
- Karma Houdini: Murderers and other criminals such as William Bradford Bishop, Joe Maloney, and the I-70 Killer who have managed to evade justice for several decades and still have yet to be caught.
- May-December Romance: When they married, Annette Burnside was 18 and her husband Jim was 46. The marriage failed not because of the age difference, but because Jim was abusive and jealous, and ultimately stabbed Annette to death after she left him. He was caught thanks to the show and eventually died in prison.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The crux of many of "The Unexplained" segments, which dealt with topics ranging from UFOs to fabled creatures such as the Yeti to religious topics such as the miracles of Fatima, Lourdes, and Our Lady of Guadalupe. Stack was always quick to point out that while skeptics might insist on rational explanations for these occurrences, true believers were unlikely to be convinced otherwise.
- Never Suicide: Probably the most common type of case during Stack's era involved someone being found dead, with Stack always introducing the segment by saying "the police ruled it a suicide, but the family says...MURDER." In many cases it WAS pretty obviously a suicide and the family was clearly just in denial, but the show would always side with the family.
- And to be fair, some were so obviously not a suicide, complete with multiple types of blood being found at the crime scene, or victims that were bound with packing wire before being dumped into incinerators, that it made you wonder just who the police thought they were fooling.
- The opposite was also true, as in the case of a Maine woman who appeared to have been abducted after leaving the house for a blind date. After her story aired, a viewer recognized her as a suicide victim whose body was found in an Alabama hotel, and it turned out she had staged the abduction to throw family and investigators off the trail.
- New Kids on the Block: The Kari Lynn Nixon story developed an interesting twist when a girl strongly resembling the missing teenager was supposedly caught on tape at an NKOTB concert. It also included a brief interview with Jonathan and Jordan Knight, in which they implored Kari to at least contact her parents and let them know she was alive. Sadly, she wasn't; the girl in the video clip was not Kari but another girl named Lynette Melancon, and when Kari's remains were found a few years later, it was determined she had been raped and killed shortly after her abduction. Still, her rapist/killer Robert Anthony Jones was ultimately caught and taken into custody.
- The Men in Black: An episode dealing with UFO sightings also talked about them
- Offing the Offspring: Or attempting to in the case of murderer and con woman Marie Hilley, who was profiled in the "Diabolical Minds" episode. She poisoned both her husband and her teenage daughter for their life insurance money. Her husband died; her daughter survived. Marie would eventually die of exposure while on the run from authorities.
- Parental Neglect: The Brenda Merrill story. Brenda's mother, Betty Nickerson, abandoned her children in a Pennsylvania farmhouse to move to the city and run a restaurant, forcing Brenda, then 16, to drop out of school to care for her younger siblings. What's more, Betty never contributed one cent to her children's well-being, and even went so far as to tell her new husband that her two youngest kids were Brenda's. The younger children were all eventually adopted out, and Brenda was ultimately successful in reuniting with all of them, but understandably still resented her mother, who was in a nursing home by the time the segment aired.
- Secret Circle of Secrets: Some stories revolved around mystery cults, a number of them alleged to be Satanic. Shane Stewart and Sally McNelly were allegedly murdered by Satanists after they left the cult. Another episode theorized that a Satanic cult were involved in New York's infamous Son of Sam murders, though only David Berkowitz (who was a member of this cult) was caught and prosecuted.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: Some murders, or near-murders, were the result of this. One of the most egregious examples is that of Joe Maloney, who served his ex-wife a poisoned drink at a birthday party, causing her to lapse into a coma and eventually die. He was later located in Ireland, which conveniently had no extradition treaty with the U.S. at the time, allowing him to evade justice.
- Patsy Wright died after taking cold medicine (which she used as a sleep aid) tainted with strychnine. Her ex-husband was suspected, but no one has ever been charged.
- Elizabeth Ortiz made her husband, Gilbert, chocolate amino-acid milkshakes (for body building purposes) that she laced with insecticide. He survived, and she was caught after eight years on the run with their son.
- Throwing Off the Disability: The segment on Lourdes included a story about a Philadelphia girl who was struck by a mysterious disease as a teenager that eventually caused her kidneys to fail. She was so ill that when her parents decided to take her to Lourdes in the hope of a miraculous cure, her doctors advised them to take along a coffin. After bathing in the spring water, the girl awoke in the middle of the night to find that she had been mysteriously cured. Doctors could find no medical explanation, but the girl and her family remained convinced it was a miraculous cure from the Virgin Mary.
- Un Cancelled: After a whopping six years!!! And then again, in 2020, thanks to Netflix!
- Would Hurt a Child: Many of the murder, kidnapping, sexual assault etc. cases sadly involved children. Jim Burnside threatened to kill his wife Annette and her family if she ever dared to leave him, and when his own daughter, Stacey, asked him if that included her, he bluntly said yes. He later made good on his threat to kill Annette.
- Sometimes applies to the authorities too, as in the Fatima segment, in which Lucia Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto were abducted by government officials and threatened with torture and execution if they didn't reveal what the "lady from Heaven" had told them.
- The Un-Reveal: Everyone realized that the truly unexplained paranormal mysteries were never going to be solved. It didn't make their episodes on them any less awesome.
- Some of the more infamous crime based cases the show covered, such as the harassment of Bill and Dorothy Wacker or the Circleville Letter Writer, will likely never be solved since in the former case both of the victims are now dead, and in the latter case the only remotely plausible suspect has already served a prison sentence and still actively denies he had anything to do with it.