From legends like D.B. Cooper and the escaped prisoners of Alcatraz to a nerdy computer geek who scammed hundreds of millions of dollars, some criminals seem to vanish into thin air. Here are some bad guys who got away with it.
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00:00From legends like D.B. Cooper and the escaped prisoners of Alcatraz to a nerdy computer
00:05geek who scammed hundreds of millions of dollars, some criminals seem to vanish into thin air.
00:10Here's some bad guys who got away with it.
00:12On November 24, 1971, a nondescript man in a nondescript suit using the nondescript alias
00:18Dan Cooper boards a flight from Oregon to Seattle. Shortly after takeoff, he hands one
00:23of the flight attendants a note.
00:24The note says,
00:25"'I have a bomb, and I'd like you to sit next to me.'"
00:28After showing the flight attendant what looks like a bomb in his briefcase, Cooper demands
00:31that $200,000 in cash and four parachutes be delivered to the aircraft when they land
00:36in Seattle. He threatens to blow up the plane if there's any funny business.
00:40Once in Seattle, Cooper frees the 36 passengers in exchange for the parachutes and a bag full
00:45of supposedly unmarked cash. The plane takes off again, with orders to fly to Mexico City.
00:51Cooper also asks that they keep the landing gear down and fly below 10,000 feet. He wants
00:57them to be going super slow and super low.
01:00Partway through the flight, Cooper opens the door, lowers the rear air stair, and jumps
01:04out. The crew, who are locked in a cockpit, don't see where it happens. All we know is
01:09D.B. Cooper was never seen again.
01:11Within five years, the FBI had narrowed their list of suspects from 800 to 24, but to date,
01:16they've never charged anyone with the hijacking. Some suspect Cooper died when he parachuted
01:21out of the plane, but his body was never found.
01:23In 1980, a young boy found $5,800 in marked bills from the hijacking, but while it was
01:29probably nice to get the money back, even decomposed, the find leads nowhere.
01:33For all we know, he's been here. You know, walked in, had a beer, and walked out.
01:41One of the most terrifying criminals to have never been caught is the Zodiac Killer, who
01:45terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
01:49This was an extremely new kind of killer. People were not prepared for this kind of
01:54psychopath."
01:55Zodiac was linked to five separate murders that took place between 1968 and 1969, and
02:00is suspected in another five from around the same time. His first confirmed attack was
02:04in December 1968, when he shot two teenagers to death while they were sitting in their
02:08car in Vallejo, California. He struck three more times in 1969, killing three and seriously
02:15injuring two.
02:16Zodiac loved to talk about his crimes. In August 1969, he sent a letter to three Northern
02:21California newspapers, claiming responsibility for the first murders and demanding his letters
02:26be published on the front page. The letters included ciphers that supposedly contained
02:30clues to his real identity, and that kept coming for five years, before stopping abruptly
02:34in 1974.
02:36The FBI worked with local law enforcement on the case, throwing everything they had
02:40at it — behavioral analysis, handwriting, cryptography, sketch artists, the works.
02:45The most common image of Zodiac is of him in a black executioner's hood with his weird
02:50symbol on his chest. But there are other eyewitness descriptions.
02:53"...six foot two, 200 pounds, stocky build, ghost."
02:58In 2018, an amateur group of cold case specialists, the Casebreakers, identified Gary Francis
03:04Post as a Zodiac, but law enforcement didn't buy it. And in 2024, Zodiac's code was finally
03:09cracked, but those long-promised clues to his identity didn't exist.
03:14There have been many theories over the years, but no one has ever been charged with the
03:17murders, and the identity of the Zodiac killer remains a mystery.
03:21In 1888, in Whitechapel, East London, a series of grisly murders set the entire town on edge.
03:27Between August 31 and November 9, an unknown person attacked and stabbed five local women
03:31to death. All five victims had struggled with alcohol and were either widowed or separated
03:36from their husbands at the time of their murders. Some of the stab marks were so deep it looked
03:40like the killer was trying to behead his victims.
03:43Then there's the matter that all five women had their abdomens mutilated and were left
03:46for dead on the street. The victims all lived within a few hundred yards of each other.
03:51Like the Zodiac killer, Jack the Ripper sent taunting letters to authorities describing
03:54the murders. The nickname Jack the Ripper came from one of these letters, which the
03:58press published immediately.
04:00According to the BBC, there is now serious speculation about the authenticity of the
04:04Ripper letters. Some think they may have been created by the newspaper to sell more copies.
04:09More than 300 people were placed under investigation, and 80 of them were brought in for questioning.
04:15Suspects included everyone from a local midwife to Queen Victoria's grandson. But still, well
04:20over 100 years later, we're no closer to definitively identifying Jack the Ripper than they were
04:24in the 19th century. In fact, we may be even further away as DNA analysis tosses more suspects
04:30into the pool.
04:31One of the most bizarre criminals to have escaped capture is the infamous Hungarian
04:35serial killer Béla Kish. Kish lived in the early 20th century in the small village of
04:40Szentkóta near Budapest. According to Charlotte Grieg and Evil Serial Killers and the Minds
04:45of Monsters, Kish shared a house with his elderly housekeeper, although he frequently
04:50had female guests over for company. In 1914, Kish joined the Hungarian army and went off
04:55to fight World War I. And that's when his crimes were discovered.
04:58When the army came to his house looking for gasoline, they found a bunch of promising-looking
05:03barrels on his property. But when they opened them up, they discovered, to their horror,
05:06the bodies of dead women. There were seven barrels, each one containing a single body,
05:11and preserved in alcohol — as if he were trying to pickle them. And to make matters
05:15creepier, if that's possible, the blood was drained from the bodies via two tiny holes
05:19in the neck. Authorities later discovered that Kish had lured the women to his house
05:23by placing ads in the local paper seeking a wife, or sometimes looking for a fortune-teller.
05:28Perhaps the latter was a test? If they showed up, it meant they couldn't see the future
05:32Kish had waiting for them. Kish faked his own death in 1916 to escape prosecution, and
05:38though there were numerous sightings of him over the years, he was never caught. His final
05:41whereabouts are unknown, and no one was ever charged with any of the murders.
05:46One of the most despicable people in history is the Nazi scientist and doctor Josef Mengele.
05:51Mengele spent most of World War II at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was
05:55known as the Angel of Death for his ruthless disregard for human life. While at Auschwitz,
06:00Mengele performed barbaric medical experiments on prisoners. He was particularly interested
06:05in working with twins, and was given absolute permission to injure, maim, and even kill
06:09his subjects if he wanted.
06:10You have no body. You have nothing. Everything is his. He's the master of you.
06:16Among the sadistic ways he tortured prisoners was by experimenting on their eyes and allowing
06:21infections like gangrene to progress untreated in order to study them.
06:24He dissected the bodies and collected the eyes for research.
06:29After the war, U.S. authorities briefly had Mengele in their custody but didn't realize
06:32who he was. He escaped. In 1959, the West German courts issued a warrant for his arrest,
06:38but Mengele fled to Paraguay and finally Brazil to escape authorities. He suffered a heart
06:42attack or stroke, depending on which source you use, and drowned while swimming in Brazil
06:47in 1979 before he could be brought to justice.
06:51Frank Matthews was the kingpin of a massive drug empire before he disappeared without
06:54a trace in 1973. Matthews, born in Harlem in 1944, had become a major New York City
07:00drug dealer by the late 1960s, importing massive quantities of heroin and cocaine from Latin
07:06America. His empire straddled the East Coast and reached into the Midwest and South, stretching
07:10across 21 states in Matthews' heyday.
07:13So here you have a black guy meeting a Cuban through a Puerto Rican to get heroin from
07:19French gangsters.
07:20However, as Matthews' empire grew, so did police interests, and by 1972, cops had tapped
07:25his phones. By December of that year, a federal arrest warrant was issued for Matthews. A
07:31month later, Matthews and his girlfriend were arrested at Las Vegas' McCarran International
07:35Airport. He was charged with distributing 40 pounds of cocaine in Miami the year before.
07:40Matthews sat in jail for four months before inexplicably being allowed to bond out in
07:45On June 26, 1973, he disappeared and was never seen again. As of 2024, there have been no
07:51confirmed leads in Matthews' disappearance. He remains among the FBI's most wanted.
07:57On September 12, 1983, Victor Jarena got away with one of the biggest, boldest armed robberies
08:02in American history. Jarena was recruited by Segarra Palmer, an activist and founder
08:06of what some call a political group and others call a terrorist organization. The group was
08:11called Los Macheteros, the Machete Wielders. Segarra and his organization planned the heist.
08:17How often do you have an inside man in a depot with $10 million?
08:22The scheme was for Jarena, an employee of Wells Fargo in West Hartford, Connecticut,
08:26to tie up two of his co-workers and inject them with sedatives to make them fall asleep.
08:30Jarena was then supposed to take over $7 million from the bank, load it into his rented car,
08:35and drive away. The plan worked, mostly. Jarena escaped with the money, which has never been
08:40recovered.
08:41The thief had so much money to steal from here that he couldn't even haul it all away.
08:45Police estimate that he left about a million dollars behind.
08:48Palmer claimed to have orchestrated the robbery to help fund Los Macheteros' fight for Puerto
08:52Rican independence. By the time of the heist, Los Macheteros were persona non grata in the
08:58United States, mainly due to their violent attacks on U.S. officials and property.
09:02The group that he did this for has been involved in murders and robberies and explosions and
09:09destruction of property.
09:10In 1985, the FBI discovered the whereabouts of Palmer and eight of his comrades and had
09:15them arrested and extradited to Connecticut. Palmer was eventually convicted on several
09:19charges and sentenced to prison, but Jarena was never found. He's still sitting pretty
09:23on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list, and there's currently a $1 million reward for
09:28information leading to his arrest.
09:31Not all criminals on the FBI and U.S. Marshals' Most Wanted lists were involved in violent
09:35crimes like murder or armed robbery. Some of them, like John Ruffo, are white-collar
09:39criminals. Ruffo concocted a scheme to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal
09:43loans. His partner, Ed Reiners, posing as a Philip Morris tobacco executive, persuaded
09:48banks to invest in a fictitious research program dubbed Project STAR.
09:52The whole project was secret, that if you were to call Philip Morris, they would tell
09:57you that Ed Reiners didn't work there anymore.
09:59Part two of the scheme was Ruffo's company, CCS, or Cemetery Computer Services, Inc.,
10:05given loans to supply computers for the non-existent project. Needless to say, Reiners and Ruffo
10:09pocketed the cash for themselves.
10:12Eventually, Ruffo was caught and sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for defrauding
10:16investors out of $350 million. However, in 1998, on the day he was supposed to report
10:21to prison, Ruffo disappeared. He rented a car that was later found at an airport, leading
10:26authorities to believe he fled overseas. But nothing has ever been conclusively proven.
10:31He's gotta be in a major city.
10:33In the Midwest, someplace on a remote farm.
10:35Somewhere in Switzerland wearing lederhosen.
10:38Nearly 25 years later, Ruffo is still at large, and authorities have few leads on where to
10:42track him down.
10:45Alcatraz Prison, located on an island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, was first
10:48established in 1934 and was designed to be inescapable. But in 1962, Frank Morris, Clarence
10:55Anglin, and John Anglin did just that. Maybe.
10:58Morris was sent to Alcatraz in 1960, and the Anglin brothers followed a year later.
11:03The three devised a plan to trick the night guards using dummies made of plaster and human
11:07hair.
11:08He walks over to Frank's cell, and he taps him on the head with his nightstick, and Frank's
11:12head falls off.
11:16During the night, they escaped their cells through holes they'd spent months carefully
11:19drilling, and headed to a secret workshop they'd set up on the roof of their cell block.
11:24There they created a makeshift raft out of prison raincoats and attempted to float away
11:27from the prison in the dead of the night. The bay waters are frigid, have strong currents,
11:32and are full of sharks. Not to mention that the closest land is at least a mile away,
11:37so it's more likely that they drowned during the escape. However, their bodies were never
11:41found.
11:42I worked on this case for 17 years until I retired, and every lead that I ever followed
11:47turned out to be nothing.
11:49In 2018, the FBI received a letter from someone calling themselves John Anglin. He claimed
11:54that all three prisoners made it out alive, but the FBI was lukewarm on the letter's authenticity.
12:00Amado Carrillo Fuentes was once one of the biggest and most influential drug kingpins
12:04in Latin America. During the 1980s and 90s, Fuentes built a drug empire while running
12:09the Juarez Cartel from the Mexican state of Sinaloa. He smuggled huge amounts of cocaine
12:14from Colombia to the U.S., and was given the nickname, Lord of the Skies, because he smuggled
12:19drugs on board his private fleet of airplanes.
12:21However, it all came crashing down in 1997, when he died on the operating table while
12:26having plastic surgery to change his appearance. At the time of his death, Fuentes was one
12:30of the most wanted drug kingpins in the world, but his enormous political power in Mexico
12:34shielded him from authorities until his death.
12:37Law enforcement from the U.S., Mexico, and even Chile were tracking Fuentes, trying to
12:41put him behind bars. When Fuentes died, it created a power vacuum in Mexico that rival
12:46drug lords rushed in to fill.
12:48Months after his death, allegations surfaced that Fuentes had attempted to bribe the Mexican
12:52government to get them to stop pursuing him. But government officials denied any wrongdoing,
12:56and there was nobody left to prove it.