The Skeleton Key Chronicles

21 hours ago

In the early hours of March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from civilian air traffic controllers’ radar screens while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. There were 239 people on board, including passengers and crew, and less than an hour after departure the aircraft went mechanically dark and disappeared from radar. Malaysian military radar continued tracking the aircraft as it turned away from its planned route, flying back across the Malay Peninsula and continuing west until it eventually disappeared from radar coverage.

The search for the missing aircraft would stretch on for more than three years and eventually become the most extensive effort in the history of aviation. Early search operations focused on the South China Sea before investigators expanded the search area west toward the Andaman Sea.

But later analysis would point investigators in an entirely different direction, suggesting the aircraft had traveled south into the remote southern Indian Ocean, something that seemed increasingly likely when pieces of aircraft debris began washing ashore along coastlines in the western Indian Ocean, several of which were eventually confirmed to have come from Flight 370.

After more than three years of combing vast stretches of ocean without locating the aircraft, the international effort was suspended in January 2017. When a final report was released the following year, investigators were still unable to say with certainty what had happened. Another attempt was later made by the private exploration company Ocean Infinity, but that effort also ended without locating the plane.

Despite years of multinational search efforts and detailed analysis of satellite data, the aircraft’s location and the sequence of events leading to its disappearance have never been confirmed. The case was revisited in a 2023 Netflix documentary that took a closer look at the evidence and the many competing theories, offering a deep dive into what may have happened that night. Earlier this year a renewed search started once again for flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean.

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The Skeleton Key Chronicles

1 day ago

The film Fargo was released thirty years ago, on this day in 1996. The Coen Brothers opened the movie with a claim that it was based on a true story, though they later acknowledged that line was meant as a bit of satire aimed at the whole “true story” aspect of filmmaking.

Even so, parts of the plot were loosely inspired by real events the filmmakers had come across over the years, which helped give the story its grounded and strangely believable tone.
They also drew on several real-life cases while shaping parts of the story. One was the 1963 case of Carol Thompson in St. Paul, Minnesota, where her husband Eugene brought too many players into a scheme to end her. Another was the 1972 case of Virginia Piper, the wife of a Minneapolis banker who was taken in an elaborate plot but later found safe. Then there was the now-famous wood chipper scene, which was partly inspired by a 1986 case in Newtown, Connecticut involving Richard Crafts and the way he attempted to conceal what happened to his wife, Helle Crafts.

Each of those cases is complex and interesting in its own right, and certainly worth a trip down the rabbit hole. As for Fargo, I definitely recommend checking out the film if you’ve never seen it.

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The Skeleton Key Chronicles

2 days ago

A new documentary that dropped yesterday takes a deeper look at the 2012 case of Skylar Neese, the Morgantown, West Virginia high school student who left her house late one summer night and never made it back home.

At first it looked like a typical missing persons case. But as investigators began retracing Skylar’s last movements and digging into the dynamics within her close circle of friends, the investigation began to take a very different turn.

Without giving too much away for anyone unfamiliar with what happened, the series retraces the events of that night, the early search effort that followed and the months-long investigation as detectives began piecing together what had really happened.

The three-part docuseries, Friends Like These is currently available on Hulu, and this one has definitely been on my list to check out. … See MoreSee Less