The fourth volume of Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries premieres on Wednesday, and co-creator Terry Dunn Meurer has an idea of which case she thinks has the best chance of being solved.
Meurer co-created Unsolved Mysteries in 1987 with John Cosgrove — and 37 years later, they’re still on a mission to find answers to the most head-scratching cases out there via their production company Cosgrove/Meurer Productions. This is the 17th season of the series overall, which began at NBC and later moved to CBS, Lifetime and Spike before ending up at its current home at Netflix.
This latest five-episode batch covers the infamous Jack the Ripper murders that took place in London in 1888; the search to identify the woman who’s severed head was found in the woods; the case of Sigrid Stevenson, a graduate student who was mysteriously murdered in the 1970s; the mystery of the Moth Man, a paranormal creature that has been sighted countless times in Chicago, and the unexplained death of Amanda Antoni, a Calgary woman who was found in a pool of blood at the foot of her basement stairs.
Terry Dunn Meurer on This Season’s Most Solvable Unsolved Mysteries Case
So which one seems the most solvable? Meurer told us she thinks that the severed head case has the best chance of being solved of any of the cases this season. She hopes that the woman whose disembodied head was found in the woods of Pennsylvania will be discovered.
“I’m hoping that somebody recognizes the woman,” she said. “And if they do, if they can figure out who she is.”
“It wasn’t just a murder and somebody cut off someone’s head and left it in the woods. This woman, her hair was all done fairly nicely, like there had been a viewing,” she says. “So I think they can figure out who she is, then they can trace it back and maybe figure out what what happened. That’s the other thing, is there’s a couple of mysteries involved. How did the head get there? Who is she?”
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The least likely case to be solved this season, she says, is Jack the Ripper. After all, the case has been cold for over 130 years.
“There are so many suspects. People are still coming up with suspects,” she says. “The people we interview are all experts and they are really lifetime, lifelong experts. They know every detail of the case, and they don’t all agree about the suspects. But I don’t think we’ll ever know who Jack the Ripper really was.”
She also told that she and the Unsolved Mysteries team tried to find a variety of cases when they went about picking the subjects for this season.
“We focused a little bit more on maybe high profile cases or household name cases, Jack the Ripper being one of them,” she says.
“People have heard the name Jack the Ripper, and he’s become such an iconic image. But nobody necessarily knows exactly what he did and how he did it. So we wanted to focus on that and that it was still unsolved. Moth Man — we had done that years ago in the vintage episodes in Point Pleasant, Virginia. And when we heard that there were all these sightings, a lot of sightings around the Chicago O’Hare area, it was like, Oh, my gosh, that’s amazing.”
Her one disappointment about the Moth Man episode was that the team couldn’t convince any airport workers or pilots to come forward with their stories in person.
“I think the witnesses that we have are very, very credible. The disappointment in that case is that it happened around O’Hare, and there are a lot of air traffic controllers and cargo handlers and pilots who have seen this creature. But nobody wanted to come on camera and talk about it,” she said. “We have some of their written, testimony that’s in the piece. So that would have been great. We tried, but people are worried about being called crazy and they’re worried for their jobs.”
She also told us what keeps her and her Cosgrove/Meurer Productions partner John Cosgrove working on this series nearly 40 years after they started it.
“Just the possibility of solving any of these cases,” she says. “In this batch of episodes, we have some really dogged investigators… in the severed head case, I mean, that happened 10 years ago and they have turned over every rock they can to try and solve that. And you want to help those people, even though there isn’t a family member that we’re interviewing.”
“All these years — 40 years that it’s been since since Sigrid [Stevenson] was murdered — and these people are still so dedicated to solving it,” she adds. “Just the possibility of solving cases — that’s it for me.”
All five episodes of Unsolved Mysteries: Volume 4 begin streaming Wednesday on Netflix.
Main Image: A still from Unsolved Mysteries: Volume 4, courtesy of Netflix.
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