Number 6. “The Bloody Car”: Judith Hyams
was only 22 years old when she discovered that she was pregnant. Since having a child
out of wedlock was a social taboo in 1965, the Florida resident secretly arranged to
have an illegal abortion. On the day of her scheduled appointment, Judith left as planned
. . . only to never return home. Three weeks later, a rental car in her name
was found hundreds of miles away in Atlanta, Georgia. Blood stains were in the backseat,
but Judith was nowhere to be found. The only possible lead was a man in his thirties who
had been seen parking the vehicle and exiting with a duffle bag. Police suspected this man
to be George Hadju, who was arrested months later for impersonating a physician, but who
was never properly questioned after posting bail and skipping town. The case went cold for 25 years until a Florida
police officer named Chuck Scherer received a strange phone call one day from someone
claiming to be a radio talk show host from Omaha, Nebraska. The radio host said they
had information about Judith Hyams from an anonymous call-in, but when Scherer called
the station the next day to verify, no one had any idea what he was referring to. Whoever
had been talking to Scherer had been an imposter. Two days later, Scherer received a phone call
saying that Judith was alive in Omaha. Shortly thereafter, Scherer received a third phone
call, this time from someone who was apparently living in Hungary claiming to have recently
spent time in the country with George Hadju, the fake doctor who was on the run. The FBI
traced the phone call and verified it was indeed from Budapest, Hungary, but they were
unable to verify that the caller had been associating with Hadju. Strangest of all, however, is how Scherer
himself had just returned a trip to Omaha, Nebraska when he began receiving these calls.
During his stay, Scherer did not mention the Hyams case to a single person (after all,
why would he mention a cold case that’s decades old). So why did he receive three
phone calls about the case upon returning, two of which were leads from Omaha? Some say
that Judith was living in Omaha and wanted to throw off the trail, but how would she
know of Scherer’s trip, and why would she think he was a threat to her discovery? No
one knows. The case was officially closed after an anonymous letter was sent to the
police station explaining that Judith had died in the rental car during the abortion,
but the three mystery calls have never been solved. Number 5. “Who Killed Julia Wallace?”:
William Herbert Wallace was a meek and mild-mannered insurance agent who lived in 1931 Liverpool,
England. He went to play chess at a local café one particular evening, as was his usual
routine. Upon arrival, however, an employee had a strange and cryptic message to give.
According to the café worker, somebody identifying themselves as R. M. Qualtrough had called
and left instructions for Wallace to travel to 25 Menlove Gardens East, where he was to
return their phone call. Wallace figured this was simply an overly discreet client who wanted
to speak with him about insurance matters and prepared himself for a short business
trip. The next day, according to what Wallace later
told police detectives, he allegedly headed to Menlove Gardens East, as per the caller’s
instructions. However, while there was in fact a Menlove Gardens North, a Menlove Gardens
South, and a Menlove Gardens West, Wallace was surprised to learn that there was no such
place as a Menlove Gardens East. The mysterious caller had given him a fictional address.
When Wallace returned home, he was shocked to find his wife, Julia Wallace, had been
savagely beaten to death by an intruder. Investigators were able to trace the mysterious
call to a phone booth that was a mere 400 yards away from Wallace’s house, and also
in close proximity to a local tramway station that he would have had to of used in order
to get to Menlove Gardens. The police suspected that Wallace had called the café himself
and left the message as an alibi before murdering his wife and catching a tram ride across town.
A jury agreed, and Wallace was sentenced to death for murder. Wallace appealed the verdict, however, and
a second look at the evidence revealed that there was no possible way that Wallace could
be responsible for the murder. A milkman had seen Julia Wallace alive at 6:45pm, meaning
that Wallace, a heavy smoker in his 50s with a kidney disease, would have had to of staged
a break-in, beaten his wife to death and cleaned himself up in less than five minutes in order
to make it to the station on time. Wallace was freed from prison, but his life would
never be the same – all thanks to one phone call that was either an attempt to keep Wallace
away from his wife during her murder, or simply a badly-timed prank. Number 4. “Caller Predicts Exact Time of
JFK’s Death”: In 1963, two switchboard operators in California overheard a strange
and mysterious fifteen-minute phone call that has been the center of countless government
investigations ever since. Doris Bliss was working the switchboards when one phone line
in particular caught her attention due to a “fuzzy sound”. She received no reply
after identifying herself as an operator, and after hearing strange whispers, Doris
got her supervisor, Jean Shores, to listen with her, now fearful that the caller might
have been having an emergency. According to FBI reports, the caller dialed a series of
numbers and then faintly whispered, “the President is going to die at 10:10”, which
was approximately two minutes away. The voice also spoke of how “there’s going to be
fire in all the windows” of “the Justice” and “the Supreme Court” before going on
to say that “the government is going up in flames”. After the caller dialed another
long string of numbers, Jean asked if she could be of service, at which point a middle-aged
woman calmly replied, “Please get off the line, I’m using the phone” in a matter-of-fact
tone. The conversation went back to more erratic whispering, and the caller slightly changed
their prediction, now saying that “the President is going to die at 10:30”. While this call was happening, President Kennedy
was unknowingly traveling towards his infamous death at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald. His
assassination occurred precisely at 10:30 Pacific Daylight Time, which just so happened
to coincide with the California time zone where the call had originated from. Even more
eerie, JFK’s motorcade was originally supposed to arrive at 10 o’ clock PDT, but experienced
travel delays. This was right around the time that the mysterious caller adjusted her prediction
of the President’s demise to 10:30. Number 3. “The Disappearance of Brandon
Swanson”: No one knows what ever happened to Brandon Swanson, not even his parents,
who were the last people to ever speak with him over the phone. In 2008, the 19-year-old
Minnesota college student became stranded after crashing into a ditch on the side of
a gravel country road. He called his parents and asked for them to pick him up, but they
had trouble finding his exact location. After 45 minutes of searching for him, the conversation
took a very dark turn. The college student grew impatient and told his parents that was
going to take a shortcut through a farmer’s field to meet them. It was a full moon that
night. Brandon screamed a four-letter curse word to his father and the line abruptly went
dead. It was the
last anyone ever heard from Brandon again. Brandon’s car was found by police the next
day, but no traces of the young man were discovered. The rural scene was unexplainably devoid of
any evidence. No foul play was suspected – in fact, forensic teams couldn’t even tell
which direction he had headed off in the night before. Over 500 volunteers and dozens of
bloodhounds could not determine what happened, despite covering 120 miles in 120 days. Police reasoned that Brandon most likely fell
into a nearby river and drowned. His parents, however, have a different story. When they
tried to call him back, they claim the phone rang and rang. If Brandon went underwater,
they argue, then the phone should not have continued to ring for hours when called. Brandon’s
mother even claims that one of the bloodhounds followed a scent trail from the car down a
stretch of road to an abandoned farm. According to her, “the dog actually jumped in the
river, jumped back out, worked the trail up to another gravel road and then lost the scent”.
Whatever happened to Brandon on that fateful night, his remains were never found – and
whatever cut his phone call short on that night was never revealed. Number 2. “Harassing Phone Calls Send a
Man to the Mental Ward”: Bashir Kouchacji worked at a trendy D.C. restaurant called
Marrakesh, which served Moroccan cuisine. Starting 1983, Bashir began to receive a barrage
of mysterious phone calls that were so extreme, they would eventually place him in the mental
hospital. Every day, a mysterious caller going by the
moniker of “L’enfant” would threaten the staff of Marrakesh with death, scream
obscenities at the top of their lungs, and go on long abusive tirades that made little
sense. The calls would begin as soon as Bashir stepped in the restaurant and would continue
every hour. Sometimes the caller would imitate a young girl, an African-American child, or
even an adult with a variety of thick Middle Eastern accents. Even though the Marrakesh’s
owner was Bashir’s niece and not Bashir himself, the restaurant still continued to
get harassing phone calls for nearly a decade, long after Bashir had stopped working there. Eventually, the phone harassment escalated
to physical intimidation. Bashir’s Mercedes Bens was vandalized and the son of his close
friend was ambushed and severely beaten. His pregnant girlfriend began receiving death
threats as well. When Bashir traveled to Philadelphia to visit with his sister and escape the harassment,
the relentless phone calls somehow followed him. At this point, he was suffering from
a lack of sleep, suffering from nightmares, and constantly fearing for his life. Even
after he committed himself to a psychiatric care facility, the Marrakesh restaurant continued
to be the target of organized phone harassment for quite some time. The FBI soon investigated, and a phone trace
revealed that the harassing calls were coming from payphones that were geographically far
apart. Basically, Bashir was the target of a calculating gang of stalkers who were apparently
trying to drive him mad. But who could they have been? There are a
couple explanations. In 1974, Bashir was kidnapped while in Beirut and tortured for five days
until he made a grisly suicide attempt forced his captors to drop him off at a hospital.
Exactly which faction his captors belonged to remains unknown. Bashir, however, claims
that they belonged to a terrorist group called the Palestinian Liberation Organization (or
the PLO for short). According to Bashir, the PLO have mistaken him for a CIA informant
and have been devoted to driving him completely insane ever since. An article in the Washington Post, however,
suggests another possibility. For years, Bashir had been purchasing advertising space in the
Washington Times and the Washington Post to run bizarre anti-Arabic messages. This apparently
is in response to his kidnapping. These ads, which Bashir calls “therapeutic”, accuse
Jewish people of corrupting Arab families, promoting homosexuality, and other strange
claims. At the bottom of the ad reads the same line: “sponsored by the Marrakesh Enterprises”.
It also specifically lists the address of the Marrakesh restaurant, along with its phone
number. No one can say for sure if Bashir was actually
being stalked by a terrorist organization since the 1970s, or if the phone calls were
a result of his anti-Arabic advertisements. Either way, the true identity of “L’enfant”
– the man who drove Bashir insane – has never been identified. Number 1. “The Washington Gangstalking”:
The Kuykendall family is just like any other Washington household, except for one major
difference – they were the victims of a perpetual and relentless campaign of cell
phone harassment that stretched on seemingly forever. It all started when 16-year-old Courtney’s
cellular phone began sending threatening text messages to her friends . . . on its own.
After that, a caller with a raspy voice began to threaten the lives of their pets, and warned
that all family members would one day have their throats slit. The incessant calls soon began to escalate,
describing every move that the Kuykendalls made in real time, from what they were doing
to what they were wearing. One conversation even told the Kuykendalls’ mother that they’d
“prefer lemons” while she was cutting limes in the kitchen. After filing a report,
the family was warned never to contact the police again. The caller would even sometimes
play back private conversations that they had somehow managed to record without the
poor family knowing, including a conversation they had with a local detective. After receiving enough anonymous threats and
intimidation, the family reached their breaking point and installed a new security system
in their home. Shortly after doing so, however, the mother received a voice mail stating that
“they” already knew what the new security code was, and that the family was not safe.
Likewise, efforts to switch phone companies were fruitless. The new phone number was always
compromised within a day. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this
story is how the harasser (or harassers) somehow seemed to be taking control of the very phone
itself. It was not uncommon for the family’s phones to turn themselves off and on out of
nowhere, and for certain settings such as the ring tone to have been changed on their
own. When the police tried to trace the source of the calls, the traced number always came
back to the Kuykendalls’ own phones – even if they were turned off at the time of the
call. Security experts suggest that a hacker may
have infiltrated the cell phone company’s website, where they could remotely exploit
cell phone features such as GPS tracking and voice mail from afar. Even if this were true,
however, the person responsible, along with the reason why someone would relentlessly
target a seemingly innocent family, remains a disturbing mystery to this day.
