So a couple of years back, maybe more than that, I wrote a book called Gatecrashers, that… well, kind of crashed and burned. I intend to revise it one of these day. With all my copious spare time.
Anyway, the actual point of this is that Gatecrashers revolved around a man who looked for missing persons, which led me to reddit unresolved mysteries, and though the book finished long ago, I keep reading the site every so often.
Most of the mysteries are just that: mysteries, with no hope of solution (at least not any solution from reddit readers, home sleuths, or wanna be web detectives). Except… there’s always one that has to nag at you. That feels eminently solvable if only you can get enough eyes on it.
There’s always the mystery that you stop reading about and start obsessing over.
I finally ran into mine.
The Flat Tops John Doe. I just keep thinking: someone out there knows him! And now there’s a sculptural reconstruction. He wrote a confident, kind of funny letter before he died, and someone with no one in his life wouldn’t have written that letter. I don’t know why he was alone out there. I don’t know if he went out intending to die, or if it was accidental or if it was a combination of both. I don’t know why they recovered money but no ID (presumably it was corrupted by decay). The letter is fragmentary, but his personality comes through in his words and in his lettering–all caps, except for the letter i? The reconstruction gave him a distinctive face. And in the grand scheme of things, 2004 was not that long ago. They put his death sometime between 1999 and 2004 (the money recovered was all dated pre 1999).
It just feels like one of those events: that all it will take is the photograph reaching the right person at the right time and Mystery Solved.
lane robins 