The Skeleton Key Chronicles

11 hours ago

A Utah case from 1974 is back in the news this week after investigators said DNA recovered from 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime’s body belongs to Ted Bundy.

Laura had left a Halloween night party in Utah County to make a quick stop at a nearby store, a short errand that should’ve taken minutes but turned into something else entirely when she never made it back.

Weeks later, she was located in American Fork Canyon, several feet off the highway along State Route 92, and even then investigators were left without a clear way to determine who was responsible. Over the years the case went cold.

It wasn’t until recently, after Utah’s crime lab introduced newer DNA technology in 2023 capable of pulling usable profiles from older evidence, that investigators decided to take another look. By 2025, they were able to develop a full DNA profile from the evidence in Laura’s case, something that simply wasn’t possible before.

That profile is what changed everything, finally putting a very familiar name to a case that had remained unsolved for more than fifty years.

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The Skeleton Key Chronicles

15 hours ago

In June 2022, a family combing Salmon Creek Beach for seashells spotted what looked like a bone in the sand. What stood out immediately was the presence of surgical hardware still attached, a detail that would later become key to identifying the remains.

Investigators now say the bone belonged to 59-year-old Walter Karl Kinney, a former banker from nearby Santa Rosa who was last seen in August 1999. At the time of the family made their discovery, there was no clear way to connect the bone to a specific missing person. But this wasn’t the first time parts of Kinney had been found.

In 1999, remains had been recovered along the same stretch of Sonoma County coastline. Those were later identified as Kinney in 2003 after his disappearance was formally reported. Using advanced DNA testing and forensic genealogy, authorities have now confirmed that the bone found in 2022 also belonged to him, more than two decades after he was last seen.

The identification closes a gap of more than twenty years, but it still leaves one question, how his remains turned up along that stretch of coastline after so many years.

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The Skeleton Key Chronicles

19 hours ago

On April 21, 1986, Geraldo Rivera hosted a two-hour live television event to open Al Capone’s so-called vault, conducting the entire show in front of a sealed underground room inside Chicago’s Lexington Hotel.

Behind him was what had long been rumored to be a hidden space tied to Capone himself. And for two full hours, he built it up like buried treasure waiting to be uncovered. Crews chipped away at the wall live on air while Rivera narrated every step, stretching the suspense as millions of viewers, myself included, tuned in to watch it happen in real time.

An estimated 30 million people watched that night, making it one of the biggest syndicated specials ever aired. And then, when they finally broke through, the “vault” revealed almost nothing. A couple of dusty, empty bottles. That was it.

Forty years later, it still might be one of the most perfectly overhyped reveals ever put on television. … See MoreSee Less