The Skeleton Key Chronicles

14 hours ago

A rare public event tied to the Fox Hollow case is happening later this month in Indiana. The Hamilton County Coroner's Office is hosting “A Conversation About Fox Hollow,” focused on the ongoing forensic work connected to Fox Hollow Farm.

If you’re not familiar, the property was once owned by Herb Baumeister, a successful businessman whose estate became the center of a major investigation in the mid-1990s. In 1996, deputies searched the grounds of Fox Hollow Farm in Westfield, Indiana while looking for human remains and recovered more than 10,000 charred bones and bone fragments.

It’s believed those remains represent at least 25 separate individuals, and many of them have never been identified. Testing and identification efforts are still ongoing decades later.

That’s where this event comes in. Officials are expected to discuss the identification process, what’s been learned through modern forensic testing, and what questions still remain.

The event is scheduled for April 22 at Prairie Waters Event Center in Noblesville, with doors opening at 6:30 PM and the discussion beginning at 7:00 PM. It also comes as renewed attention has followed the case through the Hulu docuseries, which takes a closer look at the investigation and the ongoing effort to identify the victims.

It’s not often you get a public look into a case like this while the work is still ongoing.

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The Skeleton Key Chronicles

1 day ago

In 1985, something strange unraveled under the big top of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and it wasn’t part of the show. For months, audiences had been watching what looked like real unicorns trotting across the arena, and evidently, it was convincing enough that no one really questioned it at the time.

But on that came to end on April 9th when John Kullberg, then president of the ASPCA went public and said it outright: those “unicorns” were goats that had been altered to look the part.

That reveal came right as the circus opened at Madison Square Garden, and it immediately sparked backlash. Calls for boycotts followed, and suddenly one of the circus’s most talked-about attractions turned into a very real controversy.

What investigators uncovered made it even stranger. The animals had been modified as babies, their horn buds carefully repositioned so that instead of growing apart, they fused into a single, centered horn. The result was something that genuinely looked like a unicorn, at least from a distance.

The technique traced back to Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, a self-described wizard who had actually developed and patented the process. He called them “living unicorns,” and for a while, the illusion worked well enough to fool thousands of people.

His longtime partner, Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, yes, that was her real name, is credited with coining the word polyamorous in a poem titled “A Bouquet of Lovers.” The two lived a life that feels almost as surreal as the unicorns themselves.

For a brief moment in the 1980s, mythology, performance, and reality all blurred together under one spotlight. And a lot of people walked into a circus expecting magic…only to find out later they’d been watching goats the whole time.

If you’ve not familiar with this story, it’s a seriously wild rabbit hole.

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The Skeleton Key Chronicles

1 day ago

The 2023 death of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Michael David Hicks marked the start of a series of cases involving U.S. researchers tied to aerospace and other sensitive work that has started to draw attention.

Over that same stretch, names like Frank Maiwald, Anthony Chavez, Jason Thomas, Nuno Loureiro, Carl Grillmair, and more recently, Major General William “Neil” McCasland have all surfaced, each case unfolding in its own way, but all tied back to work in advanced research, aerospace, or defense-related fields.

In total, there have been at least eight incidents involving people in these fields who have either gone missing or later been found deceased, in many cases without clear explanations. Like in Hicks’s case, where what happened was never publicly shared, and details around it have remained limited. Which is also a common thread in several of the other cases.

As recent as February there was another incident, this time involving a major general connected to high-level research programs who was reported missing from his home in New Mexico. Major General William “Neil” McCasland, 68, was last seen the morning of February 27 in a neighborhood near Quail Run Court in northeast Albuquerque. In that call, his wife described behavior that didn’t line up with how he normally was, and the way he left the house stood out right away. His phone, prescription glasses, and wearable devices were all still inside his home.

Prior to that, in June of last year, a former colleague of McCasland, Monica Reza, disappeared while hiking in the Angeles National Forest. Reza, 60, was last seen near Mount Waterman, walking about 30 feet behind her hiking companion before she suddenly wasn’t there anymore. Despite extensive search efforts, she has not been located. Reza had previously worked on a government-funded rocket materials project overseen by McCasland.

For now, how these cases connect beyond the work itself isn’t clear, and whether there’s any link between them remains to be seen. But it’s still unusual to see this many disappearances and cases like this within just three years.

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