The Skeleton Key Chronicles

9 hours ago

Okay, there is something really bizarre happening at Dollar Tree stores around the country, so consider this one more of a PSA.

A woman in San Diego recently sued the store over an incident she says happened while she was shopping at one of its stores. And once you start looking into her case, you realize she is definitely not the only woman reporting something like this. In fact, there is an entire internet subculture that seems to be connected to a growing number of these incidents. Gooners. And if you've never heard that term before, congratulations. Unfortunately, you're about to get all the deets.

This particular corner of the internet has actually been around for years. Most of what goes on stays online and behind closed doors. But apparently there's an offshoot where some men have started taking the behavior out into public places, sometimes targeting unsuspecting women, recording what they're doing and sharing it online. And for some reason, Dollar Tree keeps coming up.

The woman in San Diego says a man followed her through the store before subjecting her to extremely inappropriate behavior. But here's where her case gets even stranger. Her attorneys say another woman had allegedly been targeted by the same man at that very store the day before. They say he came back six days later and targeted a third woman. Then attorneys started digging.

One legal team's research has now identified 63 documented cases at Dollar Tree stores around the country. Sixteen involved the same kind of explicit behavior at the center of these recent cases. And there have been some pretty high-profile examples.

In Philadelphia in 2024, a woman realized she was being targeted inside a Dollar Tree and started recording. The video took off online, police released surveillance images and a 35-year-old man eventually turned himself in. He later pleaded guilty to charges related to the incident.

There's also a Texas woman identified in court documents only as MR who sued Dollar Tree after an encounter at a Houston store in 2023. As attorneys began looking into what happened to her, they started finding similar reports elsewhere.

And really, that's why this particularly weird rabbit hole seems worth sharing. Plenty of women walking into Dollar Tree for birthday decorations, cleaning supplies or a bag of candy probably have absolutely no idea this is even a thing. So if somebody seems to keep showing up in the same aisles you're in, is hovering unusually close, filming you or just making you uncomfortable, pay attention. Get around other people, find an employee or if it gets weird, let someone know what's going on.

The internet has produced some incredibly strange subcultures over the years. This is definitely one that should have stayed there.

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The Skeleton Key Chronicles

1 day ago

It’s been a few weeks since the Lindsay Clancy trial began, and jurors are now getting a much closer look at what was happening in the months, weeks and even hours leading up to January 24th, 2023. Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, is on trial in connection with the deaths of her three young children.

This week, a Massachusetts State Police forensic investigator took the jury through evidence recovered from Clancy’s phone, including internet searches, messages, notes and location data. Among that evidence was a note in Lindsay's phone she had written months earlier about struggles with motherhood, including difficult feelings toward her older children after the birth of her youngest.

Jurors also heard about internet searches she made in the days before the incident related to mental health symptoms. But some of the most significant phone evidence came from January 24th itself. That day, Patrick Clancy would leave the house to pick up dinner at ThreeV. Prosecutors say that when Lindsay Clancy searched for the restaurant using Apple Maps to check the driving distance between the restaurant and the family’s Duxbury home, it showed planning and therefore premeditation on Lindsay's part.

And there’s still a lot of this trial left to go. The defense has yet to present its case, which is expected to take a much deeper look at Clancy’s state of mind and the treatment she was receiving in the months leading up to that night.

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The Skeleton Key Chronicles

1 day ago

Leigh Marine Occhi had just celebrated her 13th birthday six days earlier when, on the morning of August 27, 1992, she got one of those little milestone perks that feel huge when you're a kid. For the first time, her mom was letting her stay home by herself. She wasn't going to be alone for long. Her grandmother was coming to pick her up later that morning to take her to an open house at the middle school where she was about to start seventh grade.

Her mother, Vickie Felton, left their Tupelo, Mississippi home around 7:35 that morning. Less than an hour later, with some pretty nasty weather from the remnants of Hurricane Andrew moving through the area, Vickie called home to do a little check-in, but no one answered. She tried again but when Leigh didn't answer, she decided she better go check the house. She only worked a mile and a half away. When Vickie pulled up shortly before 9:00 a.m., she saw the garage door was wide open and the front door was unlocked. Once inside, she found signs that there appeared to have been a struggle, and with Leigh nowhere to be seen, she immediately called police.

After speaking with Vickie and getting a chance to look around, investigators found signs that someone had tried to clean up part of the bathroom. They also discovered that several of Leigh's things were missing, including some clothing, shoes, a sleeping bag and her reading glasses. By then, the weather outside had become enough of a problem to hamper the search. Heavy rain from the remnants of Hurricane Andrew made it difficult for search dogs to pick up a trail from the house, while police and volunteers attempted to search the surrounding area through immense rainfall, making an already difficult search even harder.

Less than two weeks into the search, an anonymous package arrived at the Honey Locust Drive house. Inside were Leigh’s reading glasses, which had been missing since the morning she disappeared. The postmark revealed it had been mailed from Booneville, about 30 miles away, which immediately gave investigators another reason to look at the town. Just five days earlier, someone at a McDonald's there had reported seeing a girl who resembled Leigh. That sighting had already been checked out and turned out not to be her.

The package didn't offer much help in figuring out who had actually sent Leigh's glasses. It was addressed to her stepfather, who was no longer living at the house, and whoever sent it had used six stamps. Testing turned up one more detail. The stamps had been moistened with water rather than saliva, leaving no usable DNA behind.

The glasses wouldn't be the last time the case appeared to be heading toward an answer, a little over a year later, it looked like Leigh's family had finally learned what happened to their only child. Remains had been discovered in a Mississippi soybean field, and in November 1993, authorities publicly identified them as Leigh. Newspapers even reported that she had been found. But two days later, they retracted everything. The remains weren't Leigh's after all. They had belonged to another missing woman, 27-year-old Pollyanna Sue Keith.

Years passed without answers, then in 2024, Leigh's parents eventually made the decision to have her legally declared deceased. Their petition was granted in October, more than 32 years after Leigh disappeared, but her missing-person case remained open.

Then, just a few months later, investigators were back at the same Tupelo property where Leigh had last been seen. And this wasn't just another look around the neighborhood. The January 2025 search came after months of work on the case, with the current homeowner later saying a new investigator had developed leads and brought in equipment that hadn't been used there before. Local police, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and the FBI searched the backyard and drainage area beside the property, while a backhoe moved rocks and a forensic anthropology team from Mississippi State spent more than 12 hours at the scene looking for possible evidence of a burial. Exactly what they found, if anything, has never been made public.

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