Murder At The South Pole | Random Thursday

this video is supported by Ray Khan a while back I did a video on four mysterious deaths and disappearances but as many as two viewers may have pointed out I dropped a little mystery at the very beginning of the video the mystery of the missing story because at the beginning I said this when putting together a video of mysterious disappearances there are a million options to choose from many of which you guys have sent to me over the years but the five that I picked here yeah that video went long and then we wound up cutting one of the stories for time but it was interesting enough to carry its own video so that's what I'm doing here today but just to set this up real quick you know they say that truth can be stranger than fiction I don't know if this is necessarily stranger than fiction but it certainly sounds like fiction like I I can't believe this hasn't been made into a movie but anyway it was no further ado I bring you the mysterious death of Rodney marks Antarctica is home to no one or maybe it's better to say it's home to everyone because of the Antarctic Treaty the continent is open for all countries to perform scientific experiments and no military action is allowed there they're around 70 seasonal or year-round stations representing 29 countries around the world and they study everything from geology and biology to astronomy the u.s. keeps three stations going year-round and has the most personnel in Antarctica than any other country in the world and the most famous of these stations is the amundsen-scott South Pole Station no relation Edmondson Scott was built in 1956 and it specializes in astronomy and astrophysics due to its excellent optics down there at the South Pole but also because they have a neutrino detector one of the researchers that was stationed down there was a 32 year old Australian named Rodney Marx rodney was described as a free-spirited bearded six-foot-two scientist who liked to paint his fingernails black and color his hair purple an interest in math and science from a very young age anyone was getting a PhD from the University of New South Wales in astronomy so he was stationed in eminence got in the year 2000 to work on the Antarctic submillimetre telescope and things he'd be going well for me just gotten engaged he played guitar and a met and he was popular in social around the station he was settling in to overwinter their winter being made of August down around the South Pole but on May 11th he started getting sick he visited the station's dr. Robert Thompson on three different occasions each time feeling more pain and anxiety and shortness of breath from there he became disoriented and eventually had cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead on May 12th Thompson told the rest of the crew that he had died of unknown natural causes now because of the brutal Antarctic winter his body couldn't be flown out so it was actually put on storage until October before it was finally sent to Christchurch New Zealand eventually on its way to Australia but it was in Christchurch where a forensic pathologist came to some shocking news about marks apparently he was in perfect health but he died from complications from consuming around 150 milliliters of methanol as you can imagine this raised a lot of questions did marks commit suicide that it happened by accident could somebody poisoned him methanol was kept to the station to clean the telescope's cryogenic parts which took place in January so it had been in storage ever since then and locked away so detective grant Wormold from New Zealand began to investigate the case and he came to four possible conclusions suicide recreation accident or somebody spiked a drink suicide was quickly ruled out because marks had a lot of things going on really well for him the research is going well he just gotten engaged he had a long career ahead of him you know there were no warning signs in that direction whatsoever and besides he went to the doctor three different times that's not something you do if you're trying to kill yourself recreational ingestion was considered because he was known as a heavy drinker he also had Tourette's it was thought that maybe he might have drinkin more to cope with this to arete syndromes but the station had a well-stocked bar there was no reason for him to resort to drinking methanol and as far as accidentally drinking it it was clearly labeled as poison and locked away in a cabinet like there's no way he could have just accidentally had it not knowing what it was which goes back to the whole suicide thing that was ruled out so that only leaves one more option and his doctor wormhole concluded in his report quote in my view it's most likely dr. marks ingested the methanol unknowingly that means he was poisoned by someone if this is true this would make Rodney marks the first and only person murdered at the South Pole and whoever did it got away with it how is this not a movie there were only 49 people there they were completely snowed in nobody was getting in or out it's a whodunit set at the South Pole it's clue meets the thing but yeah the New Zealand police weren't able to solve this case they actually place some of the blame at the feet of the United States National Science Foundation who runs our Antarctic programs down there they say that they weren't very forthcoming with information the NSF denies this claim but there is some weird stuff about this the NSF sent questionnaires to all 49 people that worked with marks at the time and out of those 49 people only 13 responded with answers and that dr. Thompson guy nobody seems to know where he is now could it be that being cooped up in isolation for long periods of time can make a person go a little nuts it definitely played a part in an attempted murder at the Russian station in 2018 when an engineer seemed to have kind of had a mental breakdown and stabbed and welder in the chest that welder actually survived and eventually forgave the guy but anyway all jokes aside it is a tragedy and it's a very weird case he maybe he was murdered maybe he just did something crazy out of sheer boredom we may never know but that's what makes it a compelling mystery okay so actually after looking into this a little bit further after I recorded the previous bit I did run into some reports that apparently Rodney kept his desk a notoriously messy and did keep around on his desk cans of methanol and ethanol and stuff like that and they think that he may have just gotten drunk and Darwin awarded himself accidentally but this does contradict reports that other people said that all the methanol in the station was locked away in a safe place others say that he arrived to the South post station with this weird exotic Portuguese liquor that he bought in New Zealand and there were some speculation that it might have been some you know back-alley kind of thing and it was tainted in some way apparently the South Pole station had a still were they made moonshine and in the first runnings in moonshine it actually does produce a methanol it's thought that maybe he might have consumed some of that and got that methanol into his system that way watch out for that South Pole moonshine kid and just to confuse things further there were also reports that he had injection marks in his arm which could mean all kinds of things really it seems the more you look into this case the weirder it gets and it's easy to go down the rabbit holes of the salacious details and kind of get all caught up in that but when it all comes down to it this is the tragic loss of a young man who had a long and prosperous life ahead of him and a family that has lost a loved one and are seeking closure so let's hope that they get that okay let me take a quick minute to say thanks to today's sponsor ray con earbuds so full disclosure I've been looking for some new earbuds for a long time now I'm actually I got these up and trying to get rid of I just threw away some a minute ago I've always had trouble with earbuds that fit somehow these both hurt my ears and fall out of my ears at the same time I mean I was seriously considering spending like three or four hundred dollars on like super high-end custom fitted earbuds like that's how much trouble I've had with this I was thinking about spending that much money but then yeah ray con reached out and asked if I'd be willing to try out some of theirs and I said sure why not yeah I know there's there's some perks to what I do ya know I've been trying these out for a little while and I gotta say they're they're 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the description so go check it out and thanks again to recon for supporting this video anyway I hope you found that interesting if you did you might want to check out this video because Google thinks you'll like that one based on your viewing habits there's other videos over here on the side if you're watching on your computer if you do watch those and you enjoy them I invite you just subscribe I come back with videos every Monday all right that's it for now thanks again for watching you guys go out there have an eye-opening week stay safe and I see you Monday oh you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 294,003

Rating: 4.9275589 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, antarctica, admunsen-scott station, rodney marks, murder mystery, poisoning, methanol

Id: KtYhEaWi4lk

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020