168: London's oldest missing person's case: Mary Flanagan

In 1959, 16 year old Mary Flanagan waved bye to her family as she headed to work and then to her work's annual New Year's Eve party. But little did her parents know that Mary hadn't actually gone to work for two weeks, and she likely had no intentions of going to the party. And then she never came home. Where is Mary?-0

Siblings Chloie and Daniel were living with their grandparents in Unionville, Tennessee, when a fire broke out on 23rd September 2012. The bodies of their grandparents and pets were all found in the ashes, but there's never been any sign of Chloie or Daniel.

In 1964, 15 year old Reed Jeppson got back from a morning at church and went out to feed his beloved dogs in their backyard kennel whilst his sister prepped lunch for the family. She warned him not to take too long, that food would be ready soon... but he never came back. Both Reed and both of his dogs seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, with no clue as to their whereabouts.

On April 19th 1953, Ron Tammen came back to his dorm room at Miami University, Ohio, to discover a dead fish in his bed. Assuming it was a prank by a peer, he went to change his bedsheets and got back to his studying. And then, he just disappeared. What happened to Ron Tammen?

Today we're taking a look at some of the craziest cults the world has ever seen, including a cult in which a man worshipped coconuts... and convinced others to do the same. 

In 1992, Rachel Nickell was out for a walk with her dog and 2 year old son on Wimbledon Common in London, when a man came out of the blue and stabbed her to death. She was found with her son by her side, holding her hand. What followed was a shambles of an investigation by the Met Police, in which they decided to focus all their efforts on one (innocent) man, as the true perpetrator went on to kill others.

From the late 1970s through to the early 90s, there were a number of of victims, all young women, who disappeared along the same highway, running through Oregon in the US. It was highway 20, connecting the whole state, from west to east and running through the Cascade Mountains. It runs through cities and some of the most remote areas of the state; there are plenty of areas in which someone could run into trouble. Several stretches of the highway runs through thick, thick forest, so heavily wooded that you can walk into it and immediately find yourself lost and disorientated. Any body hidden in there would be near-on impossible to find. 

This week we're covering the cases of two Jane Does, both of whom are currently in the process of forensic genetic testing, but there's something standing in the way: it seems neither of them are from the country in which they were found, which complicates things somewhat. Who are the Bowmanville Jane Doe and Kilgore Jane Doe?

On New Years Day 1963, two teenagers come across a man lying face down next to the Lane Cover River in Sydney, Australia. At first they assume he's drunk but soon realise that's not the case. Police later find a second body, that of a woman, located just metres away, but an autopsy was unable to find a cause of death for either... all they know, is that they died from the same, mysterious cause.

In June 1980, 56 year old Zigmund Adamski left his home on home to go and grab some food shopping, and then he never came home - his body would later be found under baffling circumstances, that to this day, no one has ever been able to make sense of. The strange, strange situation around Zigmund’s death has led to countless theories over the years, none of which quite make sense but there is one theory that people seem to focus on more than the rest: alien abduction.