Some criminals face justice, some die for their crimes, and others... well, others just disappear off the face of the Earth.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Some criminals face justice, some die for their crimes, and others, well, others just
00:05disappear off the face of the earth.
00:08D.B. Cooper just might be the most infamous missing criminal of all time. The basic story
00:12is that in 1971, Cooper boarded a flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle. He handed the
00:17flight attendant a note that claimed he had a bomb in his briefcase, and you know the
00:21story from there. He jumps out of the plane and into the annals of folklore forever.
00:26At this point, he doesn't appear to be hung up in any trees. At least, this is what we
00:30were looking for from the air.
00:32The first real lead in the case cropped up in 1980, when a young boy walking near the
00:36Columbia River found a bunch of $20 bills with serial numbers matching D.B. Cooper's
00:41ransom money. By then, though, the trail had long gone cold. In 2016, the FBI finally stopped
00:47looking for Cooper after one of the longest active searches in its history. The investigation
00:51got an unexpected shot in the arm a few years later.
00:54In 2020, two individuals, Shante and Rick McCoy III, handed the FBI a parachute that
01:00they had found in their shed. The two siblings have since claimed that D.B. Cooper was their
01:04father, Richard McCoy Jr., a man who had carried out another hijacking in 1972 and was later
01:10killed in a shootout with the FBI.
01:12The FBI appears to have taken their claims seriously, too. As of late 2024, the organization
01:17is seeking verification via DNA testing, using samples taken from both the parachute
01:22and the plane D.B. Cooper jumped from. If you're familiar with the case, you know there's
01:26a lot of problems with that parachute claim, but we'll save that for another video. The
01:30point is, we're really not any closer to solving the Cooper case than we were before.
01:35Situated in the middle of the freezing cold San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz was once known
01:39as the place you put people if you wanted them to stay put. Over the course of 30 years,
01:4436 escape attempts took place, and they mostly went really, really badly. 23 escapees were
01:50immediately caught, six were killed during capture attempts, and another two drowned.
01:55But three guys might just have made it.
01:58Their names were John Englund, Clarence Englund, and Frank Morris. They planned their escape
02:02well, using information from the prison library to learn how to build rafts. To make sure
02:07no one missed them on the night they tried to escape, they built paper-mache heads to
02:11leave in their beds. And this worked, too. The guards didn't notice anything was wrong
02:15until the next morning.
02:16God damn it, Morris, I said get up! Jesus Christ!
02:25The three escapees squeezed through a cement wall and used pipes to make it up onto the
02:29roof, where they then shimmied down the smokestack. They then constructed a raft using 50 raincoats,
02:35grabbed driftwood for paddles, and headed to freedom across the bay. Or did they?
02:40It's certainly possible the three prisoners left at just the right time, took advantage
02:44of the tide, and made it ashore. Of course, it's more likely that they succumbed to hypothermia,
02:48however, and drowned in the icy waters around the prison. Whatever the case may be, John,
02:53Clarence, and Frank were never seen again, for the most part.
02:57Here's the thing. There was a vehicle stolen the night of the escape by three men not too
03:01far from where the escapees would have landed, and among the supposed clues is a 1975 photo
03:06allegedly from Brazil showing two of the men. What we're saying here is there's a chance
03:11they made it.
03:12At his trial, Sylvester Matuszka claimed that he liked seeing people die, for the point
03:17of getting sexual gratification from them. But killing just one person at a time wasn't
03:21enough, and so he engineered train wrecks to kill many people at once. If you've never
03:26heard of him before, don't feel bad.
03:28You see, he was born in 1892, and Matuszka trained as a mechanical engineer and may have
03:34been an explosive specialist in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. Matuszka later worked
03:39in the mining industry, but soon realized that his true passion was derailing trains.
03:44His first couple of wrecks only caused injuries, although the third killed 22 people. After
03:48that, he was finally caught and charged for his crimes. Matuszka fully admitted to what
03:53he had done, even suggesting that God told him to do it, and it was later reported that
03:57he had enjoyed his sexual thrill from seeing so many people hurt or killed.
04:02Matuszka's initial death sentence was commuted to life in prison. He was still in prison
04:05at the end of World War II, and after that, no one knows what happened to him. What is
04:10known is that he was hoping to hook up with the Soviets as they rolled into the prison
04:13grounds. Matuszka may have worked as an explosives expert for the Russians at the end of the
04:18war, and some rumors suggest that he fought with the Chinese during the Korean War. Whatever
04:23he ended up doing, all we have are whispers, as Matuszka was never seen again.
04:28When you think of Prohibition, you probably think of American gangsters slinging hooch
04:32on the New Jersey boardwalk.
04:33Nothing says I'm sorry like money.
04:35But the U.S. wasn't the only country to go dry. Alcohol was also illegal in Canada in
04:40the early 20th century. Just like their U.S. counterparts, many Canadian gangsters realized
04:45they could make a lot of dough by smuggling liquor. At one point, bootleggers were making
04:49around a million a month. One Italian immigrant named Rocco Perri found a lucrative niche
04:54for himself in Prohibition-era Canada.
04:57Known as the Whiskey King, Perri was at the top of his game. He ran gambling houses all
05:02over Toronto and was big in the counterfeit money market. That was until he vanished off
05:07the face of the Earth. If he was killed, no one ever found the body, and if he walked
05:11off into a new life, he did a pretty dang good job of it.
05:14In 1944, Perri disappeared in Hamilton, Ontario, after heading out for a walk. Twenty years
05:20later, no one knows for sure what happened to him. But his biographer likes to think
05:23he was tipped off about a plot to kill him and used his connections to flee to the U.S.
05:28There's a letter addressed to his cousin that certainly makes it seem that he escaped to
05:31America and hid out there in relative obscurity.
05:35Aribert Heim worked as a doctor in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, where he earned
05:40the nickname Dr. Death. Unfortunately, he managed to escape after the war ended, and
05:45went on to become one of the world's most wanted Nazi war criminals.
05:49During his time at the Nazi camps, Heim was accused of experimenting on healthy humans,
05:53including taking organs out of living victims and leaving them to die on the operating table.
05:57He was also known to inject poison into the hearts of his victims.
06:01After the war, Heim was thought to have escaped to Latin America. As it turned out, he actually
06:05continued living in Germany until the 1960s. When the authorities closed in on him, he
06:10fled to Egypt, where he converted to Islam.
06:13Neighbors there knew him as Tarek Hussein Perri, an unassuming man who would never let
06:17anyone photograph him. In the end, Heim was never caught. He died of cancer in 1992.