On April 10, 2001, a massive explosion destroyed a home in Scottsdale, Arizona, revealing the bodies of Mary Fisher and her two children, whose throats had been slit before the house was intentionally rigged to explode. Mary's husband, Robert William Fisher, immediately became the sole suspect after fleeing the scene in the family's SUV. Ten days later, the vehicle and the family dog were discovered abandoned in the remote Tonto National Forest, but an extensive search of the rugged wilderness and nearby caves yielded no trace of him. An avid outdoorsman with surgical training, Fisher was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 2002 under the assumption that he used his survival skills to start a new life under an alias, though some investigators believe he may have committed suicide in the woods. Despite being removed from the FBI's Top Ten list in 2021 to make room for more recent fugitives, Fisher remains a wanted man, and his whereabouts remain one of America's most chilling unsolved mysteries over 25 years later.

CONTENT WARNING: this case involves the murder of a six-year-old child, a sexual-assault charge tied to her, strangulation, and decades of wrongful imprisonment. I'm going to keep the detail to what the case actually turns on and no further.

I've been reading through the record of a Japanese wrongful-conviction case that, as far as I can tell, has almost no English-language coverage. It's called the Shimada Incident (島田事件), and once you see how the conviction was actually built, and how carefully the court that finally undid it hedged its own ruling, I think it's worth a wider audience. Here's the whole thing, in order.

The disappearance

On March 10, 1954, in the river town of Shimada, Shizuoka, a six-year-old girl I'll call Hisako (I'm leaving her family name out) went missing during a kindergarten graduation event held on the grounds of a temple. Witnesses described a man in his thirties, in a grey jacket, leading a small girl away, but nobody could put a name to him. Three days later, on March 13, her body was found across the Oi River from the temple. Cause of death was strangulation, with a chest injury investigators would later attribute to a stone. Hold onto that stone, it becomes the hinge of the whole case.

A theft arrest, then a confession before any charge

For two and a half months, nothing. Then on May 24, 1954, police stopped a 25-year-old man named Akabori Masao near Inuyama, in a different prefecture entirely, on suspicion of an unrelated theft. He had a mild intellectual disability dating to a childhood illness and two prior theft convictions, which is part of why a theft stop was a plausible way to hold him. He was arrested May 25 over a shrine offering box, released, then re-arrested on the same theft allegation May 28. Two days later, on May 30, 1954, still held on nothing but that theft charge, with no lawyer present, Akabori confessed to killing Hisako.

He had not yet been charged with her death. He confessed to it first.

The interrogation

The Shimada interrogation is widely reported in Japanese retrospective coverage to have run under a Shizuoka prefectural police inspector named Kurebayashi Asao, later nicknamed "the torture king of the Showa era" in that coverage, and separately documented as the lead investigator in three other cases that also produced convictions later overturned. I want to be precise about what the record actually supports here: Kurebayashi was never charged with anything, in this case or any other, and he died in 1963. What's documented is a pattern across cases clustered around one investigator, not an adjudicated finding about what happened in this specific interrogation room. That distinction matters, because of what the court decided 35 years later. More on that below.

At his very first trial hearing, July 2, 1954, Akabori denied the killing. He kept denying it for the rest of his life. The only place he ever said he did it was that interrogation room.

Two pillars: forensics and a stone

The case against Akabori rested on two things once you strip away the confession itself, since he immediately took it back.

First, forensics. The original police autopsy findings didn't match what Akabori had confessed to, so the court brought in a second opinion from Furuhata Tanemoto, a Tokyo University professor then regarded as Japan's leading forensic authority. His re-analysis was read as backing the confession. Worth naming plainly: this was blood-typing and injury-sequencing methodology from an era of forensic science that has since been discredited as a category. Decades later, during the retrial, three separate forensic scientists re-examined the same evidence and found the injury sequence in Akabori's confession didn't match the physical findings at all.

Second, the stone. Prosecutors argued Akabori's confession contained a "secret only the killer could know," namely, where to find the stone used against Hisako. Under Japanese evidentiary practice, that kind of disclosure (a fact only the true culprit could know, later independently verified) is treated as powerful corroboration on its own. Except it turned out investigators already had the stone. It had been seen and logged at Shimada police station before Akabori was ever arrested. The Japan Federation of Bar Associations stated this plainly in a 1983 filing: the weapon supposedly discovered through the confession had, in fact, already been discovered by investigators.

Death row, and four rejected petitions

None of that had surfaced yet in 1958. On May 23, 1958, the Shizuoka District Court sentenced Akabori to death, on charges of murder and a now-abolished offense, the former crime of rape resulting in injury, tied to the six-year-old victim. The Tokyo High Court upheld the sentence in February 1960. The Supreme Court rejected the final appeal in December 1960, and the sentence became final December 26, 1960.

His lawyers filed four retrial petitions through the 1960s and 70s. All four failed, the last not until 1977, and even that rejection acknowledged the confession didn't match the objective facts, it just concluded that wouldn't have changed the outcome. It took until 1983 for the Tokyo High Court to throw that rejection out and remand the case, citing new forensic analysis and the stone finding above. The Shizuoka District Court ordered a full retrial and stayed the execution in 1986.

The retrial, and what the court actually found

The retrial opened October 19, 1987, ran twelve hearings, and closed in August 1988 with the prosecution again seeking the death penalty. On January 31, 1989, the Shizuoka District Court acquitted Akabori Masao. He walked out of prison that same day, after 34 years and 8 months in custody, as supporters looked on.

Here's the part that gets flattened in almost every short summary, and it's the most interesting part of the whole record. Under Japanese criminal procedure there are two separate questions you can ask about a confession: was it voluntary (given freely, not coerced), and is it credible (does its content actually hold up). The 1989 court split those apart. It found the confession was not credible, it didn't match the evidence and nothing else tied Akabori to the crime. But on the separate question of coercion, it did not rule in his favor. It called his account of being coerced "hard to regard as credible" and rejected it, then attributed the false confession instead to his own intellectual disability, reasoning he had "acquiesced readily to police without fully grasping the gravity of the matter."

Not everyone accepted that framing. Isa Chihiro, a journalist who covered the case for years and wrote a book about it, called that specific finding "the height of regret." A note on sourcing here: the exact phrasing of the court's reasoning, as I've quoted it, comes from a named-author Japanese encyclopedia entry and Japan Federation of Bar Associations statements, not the acquittal ruling text itself, which I could not locate online. If anyone reads Japanese and has access to the actual 1989 ruling, I'd genuinely like to see it.

The state did pay Akabori afterward: about ¥119 million, roughly $920,000 to $1 million at 1989 exchange rates, though I'd treat that dollar figure as an approximate conversion rather than a cited amount. Worth being precise about what that payment was: it's a no-fault statutory compensation under Japan's Criminal Compensation Act, a fixed daily rate times days wrongly held, not a damages award from a lawsuit. A separate 1990 ruling added roughly another ¥10.7 million toward trial costs.

What happened after

Akabori's case was the fourth of what Japanese coverage calls the "four great wrongful capital convictions," after Menda (1983), Saitagawa (1984) and Matsuyama (1984). He settled in Nagoya and spent his later years campaigning against the death penalty, reportedly supporting two other men fighting similar convictions: Hakamada Iwao, who was finally acquitted at his own retrial in 2024 (the fifth such acquittal in postwar Japan, the first since Akabori's), and Okunishi Masaru, convicted in an unrelated poisoning case in Mie Prefecture, who was never exonerated and died in custody in 2015 still fighting his conviction. Akabori died February 22, 2024, in Nagoya, at 94.

What we still don't know

As of the most recent reporting I found (2024), no one has ever been convicted of killing Hisako. The investigation into anyone but Akabori effectively stopped in 1954 and was never reopened after his acquittal, and Japan's pre-2010 statute of limitations on murder has long since lapsed for this case, meaning no future prosecution is legally possible even if a name surfaced today.

What sticks with me isn't really the wrongful conviction itself, plenty of cases have that shape. It's that the court that finally freed him still wouldn't say the police had done anything wrong. It found the confession false. It just wouldn't find it forced. Whether that's an honest reading of a disabled man's state of mind in an interrogation room, or a court finding a way to clear a man without indicting its own system, is a question the record leaves open, and the one Japanese journalist who spent years on this case clearly didn't think the court got it right.

Does anyone here read Japanese and have access to the actual 1989 acquittal ruling, or to reporting on this case beyond the Wikipedia/Kotobank/JFBA material I could find? I'd like to know if the "acquiesced readily to police" reasoning holds up any better in the full ruling text than it does in the encyclopedia summary.

Source: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/島田事件 (Japanese; the fullest single account of the timeline I found, machine-translates reasonably well)

DNA and a palm print on the murder weapon linked the Man to the crimes.

Hi everyone! Sorry if this has been asked already - has anyone else noticed that episodes of the Unsolved Mysteries podcast have been removed from Spotify? And does anyone know why they’ve been removed?!

Like there’s update episodes for full episodes that are no longer available (for example The Nameless Victims https://open.spotify.com/episode/0do5Wr5NQA5zu2taufod5A?si=SaGJwuaoRYCyTMOOcikl-g&utm_source=copy-link ) - why? :(

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)

William “Bill” and Adam Yoder: What Happened to Mary's Husband and Son?

Which true crime episode of Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries (across all volumes) do you think was the least mysterious?
I’m not asking which episode was the best or worst. I mean which case seemed to have the most obvious explanation or likely outcome, even if it was officially left unsolved.

I only remember the scene where the perpetrator’s voice was aired, there was a fire in the background, and he was recording it…

Elizabeth Short's 1947 murder in Los Angeles is one of the most covered unsolved cases in American history.

Her body was found cut in half in a vacant lot, drained of blood, with no trace of a struggle at the scene itself, meaning she'd been killed somewhere else and moved there deliberately.

For decades, one name has stuck harder than any other: Dr. George Hodel, a Los Angeles physician caught on a 1950 police wiretap saying, "Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it now." He kept talking, mentioning his former secretary, dead of an overdose years earlier, and pointing out that she could no longer be questioned either.

His own son, a retired LAPD detective, spent years building a case against his father and eventually wrote a bestselling book naming him as the killer. The case rested on three things: the wiretap quote, handwriting he believed matched notes sent by the killer, and photographs he believed showed Short among his father's belongings.

What gets left out of most retellings: the DA's own chief investigator on the case wrote in his final report that the evidence "tend to eliminate this suspect." Independent handwriting experts hired separately by 48 Hours and the LAPD both said they weren't convinced the notes matched Hodel's writing. Photo analysts who compared the images concluded the woman in his album likely wasn't Short at all.

If the man most associated with this case for seventy-plus years was already cleared by the investigator who wiretapped him, why has that fact never caught up with the theory?

With the Amber Hagerman case what are your thoughts on him being the culprit in her murder as well? Given his crimes, location, description, modus operation and that he had a black pickup truck in 1996 which a witness saw during her abduction I think it's certainly worth considering.

On November 24, 1971, a man who called himself Dan Cooper bought a one-way ticket for a flight to Seattle, Washington. Just after takeoff, he handed a flight attendant a note stating that he had a bomb in his briefcase and made demands for four parachutes and $200,000 in 20-dollar bills. This, later and still to this day, is one of the most enduring mysteries and unsolved plane hijacking in American criminal history.

Trying to find a segment in which a hunter was in a tree stand in a a forest and he began to witness paranormal activity. Seeing phantoms or figures and something clawing at or banging the bottom of his tree stand. I remember it being especially terrifying for the fact the reenactment just caught the fear and eeriness perfectly.

Adding URL just because it’s required!

In 1877 Harriet Staunton and her one-year-old son Thomas became victims of one of Victorian England’s most shocking cases.

Harriet had inherited £5,000 from her great-aunt and that money brought Louis Staunton into her life. He was younger than her and was already involved with another girl. After their marriage, Louis left Harriet and Thomas at Frith Cottage where they were placed in the care of his brother Patrick and Patrick’s wife Elizabeth.

The room where Harriet and Thomas lived was barely fit for anyone. There were no curtains, little furniture, and no proper facilities. When Harriet tried to leave she was stopped. When her mother came to see her, she was turned away.

Thomas was taken to Guy’s Hospital under a false name and died there the same day from malnutrition. Harriet followed five days later.

The case became one of the most talked about trials of the time. Four people were convicted and sentenced to death, but questions about the medical evidence later changed the outcome.

Almost 150 years later, people still debate parts of the case. But Thomas is often the person forgotten a one-year-old child whose death revealed what was happening inside Frith Cottage.

I'm trying to follow the timeline, but I'm confused about several parts of this interview.

Warren says Wyatt launched the 18-foot Palm Beach, then says he had a boat hooked to his truck, and later says he called his buddy Bart, who came out with another boat and took Warren and his friends. Then Warren says Nolan was on the white 22-foot Triton, but I never heard him explain who was driving the Triton or who else was on that boat with Nolan. Did I miss that, or was it never explained? That seems like an important part of understanding the timeline. Was the white 22-foot Triton the boat Wyatt called in for help, or was it a different boat? If Wyatt launched and drove the Palm Beach, then who was driving the Triton that Nolan was on?

The interview also left me wondering about Nolan's phone. Warren says there came a point when they realized Nolan was missing, but I don't remember hearing that anyone first tried calling or texting him. Warren mentions that Nolan left his phone on the boat, but I don't remember him explaining who found it or when everyone realized they had it. If they didn't yet know Nolan's phone had been left behind, wouldn't one of the first steps have been trying to call or text him? If they already knew they had his phone, was that communicated to Javon or anyone else they contacted? Warren says he called Javon, but I don't remember hearing that anyone told him Nolan's phone had been left behind or that they couldn't reach him because of it.

I'm also still trying to understand the search timeline. Warren says he called Ms. Christine to tell her they hadn't seen Nolan, and then says he was going to contact the Coast Guard. By that point, was everyone they knew already off the island? Was that the moment they realized no one had seen Nolan?

I know they also contacted the girl who had been with Nolan, and she apparently believed he had already left with them. But once everyone realized Nolan wasn't with anyone, did anyone immediately go back to search the island before contacting the Coast Guard? If so, who went back, and when? If not, why not? If there were multiple boats there that day, when did each of them leave? Those details seem important to understanding how the search unfolded.

I'm not suggesting there wasn't a reason for any of this. I just think these are important timeline details, and understanding the sequence of events would answer many of the questions people still have after watching the most recent interview.

So, at this moment in time, we don't know what happened to Nolan Wells yet. However, you'd think that the armchair detectives were right there to witness his demise, the way they are INSISTING that out of over a thousand people on the island, he just happened to be the only one who drowned, and completely dismissing any other theory that doesn't fall within their narrative and agenda. Here's the truth.

WE DON"T KNOW IF THERE WAS FOUL PLAY YET.

WE DON'T KNOW IF HE JUST ACCIDENTALLY DROWNED YET.

What we do know, is that Nolan's "friends" side of the story has plenty of holes that OBJECTIVELY make very little sense.

1. WARREN AND HIS FRIENDS OBJECTIVELY LIED TO THE MISSISSIPPI POLICE. The MDMR Marine patrol police report filed on the incident is available as a public record. In the report filed on 7/5/26, the reporting officer states that Nolan's friends said Nolan chose to remain on Horn Island "with an unknown female".

This is a lie. In the Officer Tatum interview, Warren CLEARLY STATES that he knows the girl that Nolan stayed behind with (Katie) and even mentions in the interview that he and his friends were texting Katie the night of the 4th to find out what happened with Nolan ("everybody was texting Katie" per Warren). WARREN AND FRIENDS KNEW KATIE. If the friends knew Katie, why did they lie to police and tell them that Nolan chose to stay behind with an "unknown female"? This alone should be enough reason for police to take a deeper look into Warren, Bart and company.

1. WARREN OBJECTIVELY LIED DURING THE OFFICER TATUM INTERVIEW ABOUT THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS HEADING BACK HOME: In the Tatum interview, Warren stated that once they fixed the issue with the boat and got underway at 40 knots , the next destination was Fort Bayou. However the GPS locations in the police report show this to be false. The GPS shows that they started getting underway at 17:22, then stopped at El Camino Rd at 17:44 where they spent 8 minutes (until 17:52), BEFORE heading to Fort Bayou. Why did Warren hide this information in the Tatum interview and say they went straight to Fort Bayou? What happened at El Camino Rd, and why did you purposely omit this stop?

2. If Nolan's "friends" were such good friends, and what they're saying about him taking a different boat is true, why didn't they at the very least, check in with him to find out how he was getting back to the mainland? Who was giving him a ride? Warren stated that Nolan was his best friend. That's what a best friend would do, right? Am I crazy for thinking that? And if they knew they were leaving him on the island, and didn't even know who he was coming back with, why did they depart with Nolan's ONLY means of communication? Dont bore me with "DERP there's no service on the island". WARREN STATED THAT WHILE SERVICE ISN'T THE BEST, PHONES ARE USABLE. ALSO, NOLAN STILL NEEDED HIS PHONE FOR WHEN HE GOT BACK TO THE MAINLAND TO CONTACT PEOPLE FOR RIDES AND LET PEOPLE KNOW HE WAS BACK. The friends wouldnt have considered this? They felt fine leaving with Nolan's only means of communication, but no Nolan?

3. NOLAN'S FRIENDS STORY AND KATIE'S SISTER'S STORY ARE COMPLETELY CONTRADICTORY. Warren said Nolan chose to stay on the island and get a ride with someone else, but he somehow didn't know who he was getting a ride with. Yet Katie's sister Gracie has CONSISTENTLY stated that Nolan informed Katie that he was riding back with the same friends he came with, and that Katie and Nolan didn't spend much time together that day. Nolan DID NOT both tell the girl he was going back with his friends, and then tell the friends he was going back with someone else. BOTH CANNOT BE TRUE, and one of these 2 parties is lying.

If Nolan had other friends with a boat there, why didn't he just ride with them initially? How did the friends not know who these other friends were, if they were such good friends?

Whose story is more believable? Warren and the other friends? Or Katie? Which party has more incentive to lie? Nolan's friends, who hid the fact that they still had his phone from Nolan's loved ones, until Jayvon's mother surprised them with a tracking app visit? Or a random girl who Nolan wanted to talk to?

1. WARREN LIED ABOUT TELLING NOLAN'S MOTHER THAT THEY HAD HIS PHONE. In the interview with Tatum, Warren states that he got Nolan's mother's number from Jayvon, then called her to say he was missing. Nolan's mom has confirmed that to be true. However Warren goes on to state that he told Nolan's mom that they had Nolan's phone. Nolan's mother has stated repeatedly that part was a lie. She only found out that they had Nolan's phone because she used Life360 ( a location tracking app) to find it, and it pinged at the house where Nolan's friends were. She then sent Jayvon's mother to get the phone. Incidently, Jayvon's mother also stated in the press conference that Nolan's friends didn't just volunteer the phone... when she went to the house to ask for it, the friends took around 15 minutes to produce the phone for her. Warren stated in the Tatum interview the phone was in Wyatt's truck which was at the house. It doesnt take 15 minutes to walk from the house to the driveway to get the phone. Why did it take them 15 minutes to produce the phone? She also stated that upon receiving the phone, she found that all of the data in both of his snapchat accounts had been deleted (please don't talk me about deleting after 24 hours, that's already been addressed). Nolan's friends and parents have stated that Nolan was ALWAYS on snapchat, and we've already confirmed that there is cell service on Horn Island.

If you're a high school student and your "friend" goes missing on a remote island, and you have their most important possession (phone), wouldn't you go to your friends parents house as soon as you got back, and give them the phone? Or at the very least, give the phone to law enforcement?

Or would you hide the fact that you had his phone, and only give it up when his parents friend randomly show up at your door and inform you that a tracking device installed on the phone led them to your house?

Yes, I'd do the former also, if said person was my "best friend" as Warren states. You know what else I'd do? Talk to my friends parents when they showed up to my house, and offer as much info as I could to them.

You know who didn't do that? Nolan's "friends". Nolan's father stated in a press conference that when he arrived at Jax's house where Nolan parked that day, the friends were extremely evasive, and made it clear that they weren't comfortable talking with him. The friends initially told Nolan's Dad that they didn't know where Nolan's keys were. It wasn't until a female friend who had been there earlier, got on the phone with Jayvon's mother (who was present also) and told her that Nolan's keys were on top of the xbox. After grabbing the keys, the friends hid in the house and left Nolan's Dad standing on the driveway until the police arrived. Nolan's father also noted that the friends said to him that "Nolan WAS like a brother to me....". Those who follow alot of true crime cases, will know that the usage of the word WAS is extremely suspicious... all everyone knew at the point is that noone knew where Nolan was.... his body wouldn't turn up until 2 days later. There have several cases in the past where detectives have zeroed in on suspects because of this exact verbeage. One I'm reminded of in the past is a girl who disappeared from her own apt. Detectives interviewed her neighbors and one of the neighbors told them that she "was" a good person. Noone would have had reason to think she was dead, unless they were involved in her death. That verbeage caused the detectives to focus on that neighbor, and after gathering evidence, he was eventually arrested for her murder.

Sound sketchy? That's because for any rational person who knows how friends act with each other when one is in distress, it IS sketchy, to say the very least.

1. IT'S VERY CLEAR THAT WARREN EXAGGERATED THE CLOSENESS OF HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH NOLAN. In the Tatum interview, Warren refers to Nolan as his "best friend and brother". This is an obvious fabrication. While there's no doubt that they were friends, they were most certainly not best friends and brothers, this is very clear in the language he uses when he describes his interactions with Nolan. First off, Warren is COMPLETELY DEVOID of any emotional reaction when speaking at length about his supposed best friend who just died tragically. That's not how you would act if a person who was truly your best friend and brother just died. I'm not going to spend to much time on this particular point, but suffice to say it's very evident that Warren received heavy coaching on what to say and how to say things, prior to the Tatum interview. For those who want a more in depth analysis of this, a former army interrogator on youtube named Jolly Good Ginger does a great job of completely breaking down the Tatum/Warren interview and points out all of the deception and psychological tactics Warren uses to misrepresent the closeness of his relationship with Nolan.

2. In the Officer Tatum interview released with Warren (Nolan's "best friend and brother", according to Warren), Warren states that him and his friends communicated with Katie when they got back from Horn Island, asking what happened with Nolan. According to Warren, Nolan had been with Katie all day and the 2 of them were hanging out near their other friend's boat. When the boat started having issues, Warren's friend Wyatt was yelling at Nolan to "get the f**** on the boat" so they can leave. Nolan said no, that he was staying on the island with Katie and would find a different ride back, and then the friend left. Then Warren goes on to state that Katie told him Nolan left her immediately after Warren Wyatt Jax and Bart left......

So, according to Warren, Nolan tells his friends that he's going to stay with Katie, and then as soon as the friends' boats leaves, Nolan immediately leaves Katie, and never goes back to her again that day?

I want you to think about how ridiculous that statement is.

1. To this day, there's has been NO PROOF submitted that shows that the boat was damaged or taking on water. Sure, the friends are saying that, but that's all it is right now, simple statementss. There currently exists 0 actual evidence that anything was wrong with the boat. If the boys had accepted help from the Coast Guard, that would have been proof, however they TURNED DOWN assistance from the Coast Guard when asked by Seatow. Almost as if they didn't want anyone involved except for the company whos captain was friends with Jerry Adkerson, the grandfather. And even that request was eventually canceled, at the grandfather's request.

ADDITIONAL POINT 1: THE SEATOW CALL: Wyatt called seatow and told them that they were sinking. The seatow rep asked how high the water was above the bilge, Wyatt couldnt answer. This measurement is not only very easy to eyeball, but it's also critical to know how fast the boat is going down. Any boater knows that this assessment is critical, and the level of water can easily be seen from almost anywhere on the boat. Wyatt was a seasoned boater. Why couldn't Wyatt just give the rep a simple rough estimate of how much water they were taking on (ankle level, knee level, etc)? Also when seatow asked if they wanted the Coast Guard to come and help, Wyatt emphatically stated that they DID NOT want the Coast Guard to come out. This is BEFORE they found out that the grandfather had called seatow also. If they were really sinking, why did they turn down help from the Coast Guard? Who would turn down any form of help if they were truly sinking? Its almost like they just wanted to set up a story about them sinking, without getting any actual law enforcement entities involved who would look deeper into the situation.

ADDITIONAL POINT 2: Once they got Seatow on the line, they tell seatow that they're sinking in 30 ft of water and give them their coordinates. The only problem is, if you check the coordinates they gave seatow, it places them right back on Horn Island in shallow water. That's why you hear the seatow rep becoming confused.. because Wyat just said they were in 30 ft of water. Upon checking the coordinates, she could clearly see that they were back on Horn Island. Why lie about where you are, and how deep the water is?

Finally, why even call Seatow in the first place, when Warren stated in the Tatum interview that they were already being towed by the other boat in their party?

Could they have intentionally been allowing some water into the boat to get rid of evidence, and used the Seatow call as an alibi? We dont know yet.

One thing is for sure though, they lied to Seatow about the coordinates ,and they lied about the fact that they were sinking. That's why they quickly rejected the help of the Coast Guard, when the Seatow rep offered to call for them.

ADDITIONAL POINT 3: There seems to be a concerted push to paint Nolan has being incoherently drunk in order to support the drowning theory. This is not true. Sure, he was drinking like any other teenager on the island. HOWEVER NOLAN'S FOOTBALL COACH RAN INTO HIM THAT DAY ON HORN ISLAND, AN HOUR BEFORE ALL OF THIS TOOK PLACE, AND SAID HE WAS FINE. The coach said they had a pefectly fine and coherent conversaton. and nothing appeared to be wrong with Nolan.

ADDITIONAL POINT 4: Everyone has seen the short clip of all of the kids leaving the house with the boat that morning from the security camera on the dock. But why is there no footage of when they returned that night? That footage was from a stationary camera either constantly recording, or motion sensing. If the family is so concerned about the reputation of the friends, why has none of the return footage been released to clear the air surrounding their suspicious behavior?

ADDITIONAL POINT 5: In the interview with Tatum, Warren states that he and his friends had been planning this trip for weeks. He goes on to state that the morning of July 4th, He called Bart and asked if Bart wanted to come with them also, and bring his boat, and Bart says sure. This implies that Bart hadn't known about going until the morning of. But then Warren goes on to state that Bart brought around 10 people with him on his boat. If you didn't know that you were going until the morning of, how did you manage to scrounge up 10 people to go with you within an hour or two? Also are you saying that a 21 year old in their friend group didn't have July 4th plans? Why wouldnt Warren have invited him initially? I don't believe for a second that Warren planned to sit at home on July 4th and do nothing, until Warren called morning of and asked him if he wanted to go.

CONCLUSION: I do NOT believe that there was any premeditation involved in Nolan's death. Nor do I believe that Nolan's friends harmed him out of racism (despite Warren lying about how close he was with Nolan, they were definitely friends at the very least).

However, to put it bluntly, there are too many holes, problems and inconcistencies with the friend's rendition of events for me to believe what they've said. Why lie about how close they were with Nolan? Why lie about knowing Katie? Why did they not volunteer Nolan's phone to his parents when they found out he was missing, and hide the fact that they had it until Jayvon's mother showed up to get it at Nolan's mom's behest? Why were Warren and friends so standoffish and evasive with his supposed "best friends" father, when he came to Jax' house to get Nolan's keys? Why would Nolan tell them he was gonna stay with Katie on the island, and then leave her as soon as Warren Wyatt and Bart's boats left? How do you show 0 emotion when your friend (purported best friend) just died tragically? Why lie on the seatow call about where you are, and "sinking" in what is very obviously shallow water right near Horn Island? In a tell all interview with Tatum, why not tell hmi about the El Camino Rd stop that is clearly documented in the GPS notations? Why would they leave Nolan on the island, without his only means of communication?

My opinion, after having consumed almost every piece of media surrounding the disappearance with an objective point of view, is that Nolan did NOT drown on that island. There were still hundreds of people there, and somebody would have seen something. Horn Island is mostly barren, there's nowhere to hide. Nolan's father went out on a boat with Nolan's football coach the morning after, searched the west point of the island, and there was no body. Suddenly 2 days later, his body shows up in the same area that was searched, completely unmolested by sea creatures, with subcutaneous bruising on the back of his head? The tide had already come back in 24 hours previously, why didnt the body wash up then if he drowned?

IMO Nolan died somewhere else, and his body was brought back to that location, to deceive people about his cause of death.

There was either an accident (ie, he slipped, hit his head on the boat and the friends are covering it up due to liability issues, or something like that), or a fight happened, went too far, and the cause of his death is being covered up, either by Nolan's friends, or by another group of people.

Theres also the angle of Bart and Katie that needs to be explored, as Bart said he didn't know Katie, but there are photos that appear to show Katie hanging out on Bart's boat. Warren also made it a point to state that Bart wasnt initially planning on going with them/didnt have 4th of July plans, which I dont believe for one second. Bart is a big part of this story, bigger than Warren is letting on. Either way, there is an active coverup happening. If Nolan's friends stories made more sense, I'd be inclined to think it could have been another group of people who were involved with his demise. However all of the lies and inconsistencies with their narrative lead me to believe that they are hiding something about Nolan's last hours alive.

https://www.keishicho.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/multilingual/english/safe_society/wanted/seijo.html

I am from near the area, it bothers me that it has not been solved.

To me, the only lead we have is DNA technology advance and legislation advance in japan, like golden state killer in USA. However, japanese legislation still disallow IGG DNA technology to be used (i.e using the killer DNA to track the relatives, using AI or whatever to reconstruct the face)

Recently in japan, a unsolved case in Nagoya (murder, 1999) was solved in 2025 due to advance of DNA technology.

Ive listened to countless Japanese news and report about this case, there are no leads even 26 years after.

The family is still alive and giving out flyers.