Michael Alan Marshall’s one and only

Famous Missing Stiffs of History

Spectacular NEW EDITION!  Jam-packed with lots and lots of extra stiffs!

 

 

What follows is a detailed rundown of what became of the tombs and bodies of famous historical people.
Do excuse my sense of humour, which I’m afraid I’m rather well known
 for and which crops up in many of these entries. However it does not
detract from their factual accuracy.

 

 

Material: Mike’s research files. The various cadavera que desunt are listed in chronological order.


 
Imhotep was the Chancellor and something of a "Merlin" figure to King Djoser of Egypt in about 2630 BC. He was also a physician and a master architect, and the first common person to be deified after his death. He is thought to have been entombed somewhere in the Saqqara area of Egypt in c 2600 BC but his tomb remains lost. He was such an achiever during his lifetime that his tomb, like that of the much later Cleopatra VII, is regarded as something of a Holy Grail among Egyptologists.


Khufu (Cheops) was the 2nd pharaoh of the 4th Dynasty in ancient Egypt, and reigned for just under 30 years, dying in about 2565 BC. He was responsible for the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza, in which he may or may not have been buried. The pyramid had certainly been plundered by the 9th century AD and probably long before, and today contains an empty sarcophagus. However it’s an ongoing matter of scholarly debate as to whether he was originally buried elsewhere, or was buried in the pyramid and his remains looted and destroyed, or whether he was removed along with others to the Valley of the Kings when tombs were built there beginning about 1,000 years later.

Nefertiti (Neferneferuaten), the consort of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenophis IV), died in abt 1330 BC but her remains, and those of her parents and children, have never been found or identified. In 1898 two mummies, one of an older woman and one of a younger one, were found inside the tomb of Amenophis II and were advanced as possible candidates, but the older one was subsequently found to be Queen Tiye, Akhenaten's mother. The younger one, the "Younger Lady", as she has been named, is however known (DNA) to be Tutankhamun's mother and Akhenaten’s full sister. We do have Nefertiti’s DNA, from the two unborn babies found with Tutankhamun by his wife Ankhesenamun, Nefertiti’s daughter; this DNA does not match with the Younger Lady, proving that the Younger Lady, Tut’s mum, is not Nefertiti.

 

However back in 1819 a tomb now called KV21 (KV meaning Kings’ Valley or Valley of the Kings) was discovered and found to contain 2 mummies, one of which was proven in 2010 from DNA analysis to be none other than the biological mother of the 2 fetuses found buried with Tut. In other words, Ankhesenamun, Tut’s wife and Nefertiti’s daughter. Naturally this leads to speculation that the other mummy in KV21 might be Ankhesenamun’s mum, Nefertiti herself, but the DNA results were inconclusive meaning that DNA technology is going to have to be advanced a little further before we’ll know.


Alexander the Great died probably from poison in 323 BC in Babylon, and his bejewelled body was wrapped in beaten gold before being transported west for Macedonia in a large cortege. However, said cortege was intercepted by Ptolemy Soter, one of his generals, and taken to Memphis, Egypt where the stiff was entombed. Later it was transferred to a tomb in Alexandria. Then, in 90 BC, the tomb was opened and, in a touching display of reverential respect for the dead, the gold shroud was ripped off the stiff and sent down the mint to hammer off a few extra sovs.  Alexandria has since changed very considerably and the original building which housed this tomb has long been built over and lost. Recently in Macedonia a large tomb has been discovered, which may have been the tomb the original cortege was heading for, and there is some evidence that the stiff was actually sent there by the Roman emperor Caracalla, a big fan of Alexander's, in about 210 AD. In November 2014 a skeleton was found in the tomb, and tests are under way to try establishing its identity.


Spartacus was allegedly killed during the Great Slave Revolt (Third Servile War) in 71 BC in a battle which took place beside the river Sele near the village of Quaglietta, about 25 miles east of Salerno, Italy. However his body was never identified and he may have lived on, although six thousand prisoners from the battle were all crucified along the Appian Way between Rome and Capua and he could in theory have been any one of these.

Arsinoe IV (head missing) was the intellectually prodigious younger sister of Cleopatra VII of Egypt. Acting under her own authority and having replaced her generals’ battlefield tactics with her own, she soundly defeated Julius Caesar at the Battle of the Pharos at Alexandria in 47 BC, at the age of eleven (yes, that’s right, 11) after booting Cleo off the throne for literally getting into bed with the Romans. She was then proclaimed Queen of Egypt in her sister’s stead.

Arsinoe was subsequently murdered in 41 BC (by then aged 17) while in exile in the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, by Marc Antony at Cleo’s behest, an act which disgusted and scandalized Rome who rather admired her, not only for sticking to her principles but also for giving their hero Julius Caesar the hiding of his life. Her fellow egghead Octavius, another child prodigy who admired her loads and loads, later marched relentlessly on Marcus and Cleo, and that was the end of them both.

In the early 20th century a tomb in Ephesus was found to contain her remains, which were then taken to Germany for forensic examination. However during WW2 the building which housed her remains was bombed by the British, and her skull was lost.


Cleopatra VII and Marcus Antonius both committed suicide in 30 BC after finding themselves unable to stop the relentless advance of Octavius (Augustus) and his forces into Egypt. Cleopatra, having inherited the throne of an ancient nation with a largely unchallenged history of supremacy, witnessed the horrible spectacle, during her tenure, of a huge empire (Rome) taking form just beyond her borders, which she tried to keep divided by seducing its various leaders and then playing them off against each other. However she kept backing the loser. Finally, after murdering her extremely brainy kid sister Arsinoe IV, she found herself facing the prospect of seducing a mate of Arsinoe’s, the prodigious, calculating and methodical Octavius, the Mr. Spock of the ancient world -- and knew she'd met her match. Realising that she was about to shag a machine, (and also that she’d pissed him off somewhat), she quickly killed herself. She and Marcus Antonius were interred in her tomb which is thought to have been in the section of Alexandria later submerged to a depth of 25 feet beneath the Mediterranean by an earthquake. However others theorise that they are buried at nearby Taposiris Magna. Much searching at the latter location; personally I believe they should try a bit harder at the former.

 

 

Cleopatra VII. Her present day pharaonic
heir to now-Islamic Egypt, could be Israeli.

 

 

Caution: Much secret resistance and involvement by the Egyptian authorities. If Cleopatra's mitochondrial DNA should become available, a match among the female population alive today would make the owner of the DNA Queen of Egypt (as their throne passed through the female line), thereby reviving the old monarchy. This might cause political problems which the Egyptian government could presently do without, especially if the match is from Israel which was once Egyptian territory.

Caesarian (Ptolemy XV) was the son of Cleopatra VII of Egypt and Julius Caesar. In or around 30 BC, at the age of approximately 17, he was killed on the orders of Augustus (Octavius) during the Roman annexation of Egypt, but his body was never accounted for. Some posit that he was intercepted by Augustus' forces while trying to flee to India, while Plutarch said he actually went to India, but was enticed back when Augustus promised him some limited rule in what had become the new Roman province of Egypt.

Jesus Panthera would have been next in line to the throne of Judea except that the Romans were occupying his country. And so, he set about booting them out. His royal descent from King David is shown in many editions of the Bible, usually at the front, and his mum, Mariamne Stada (which translates to Mary Starr which means Star of the Sea from the Latin Mar=Sea) was in reality one of the granddaughters of King Herod the Great, who cherished her and her sister “with special care”. Panthera launched an insurrection at the Passover of 36CE, in which he entered the East gate of the temple in Jerusalem seated on an ass, facing backwards towards the rising sun, while people lined the ass’s route with palm branches. This was the precise way in which all the kings of Judea had ridden to their coronation. Pushing over some tables in the temple was the signal to start the rebellion, but the insurrection was quickly put down and he was later executed, after turning himself in in exchange for the release of his son Jesus bar Abbas, bar Abbas meaning Son of the Master, which the church has tried to conceal by sticking the 2 names together to make Barabbas, a surname which no Jew past or present has ever heard of.

The Heavenly Stiff was buried in a tomb the location of which was subsequently lost. However in 1980 a tomb, the Talpiot Tomb, was discovered just 3 miles south of the old temple, in which the names of the interred matched very closely the names of the Holy Family, to a degree that there’s only one chance in 30,000 that it’s not them. However the bones, which included those of Jesus, were reburied in a place known to the Israeli authorities but apparently not to anyone else, Israel being in a bit of a sticky position as, surrounded as they are by hostile Arab states, they rely on the Christian West for their survival and don’t want to piss them off by exposing their religion as a fraud.

Note: “God’s Son on Earth” was a title of every King of Judea from David onwards, to make pretenders think twice about the eternal consequences of overthrowing the king. A few decades after Jesus, this Turkish bloke called Saul of Tarsus milked this one for all it was worth, and started a new religion, Christianity, named after yet another ancient royal title, Christos, which means anointed as in an anointed king.  He preached that the plebs (plebeians, the poor folk), could do whatever they liked and their god would always forgive them, holding whatever they had done to be nobody’s business except the transgressor and God, which latter would curse the offended person for standing in judgment on the transgressor. Naturally this religion spread rapidly among the wretched and the poor -- to the chagrin of every respectable Roman.
Needless to say, with a potential earner like that it wasn’t long before the organizers then started sending the collection box round and they were all going to burn in Hell for not going to mass. The jaws had begun to close.

 

Boudicca:  Queen of the Iceni tribe of what is now Norfolk, England. Probably ruled from Thetford. Allegedly took poison in AD 60/61 after suffering a crushing defeat at the Battle of Watling Street (location unknown). The stiff may have been taken home to East Anglia, or cremated or hidden to prevent it falling into Roman hands. The Romans would have gone to inordinate lengths to get their hands on her, alive or dead, and would have had eyes and ears everywhere, even in her own lands, and so a key to discovering her remains today would be to consider ways whereby her people might have disposed of her honorably, but without the Romans knowing or being able to do much about it.

However around the turn of the 20th century some workmen near Birdlip in Gloucestershire stumbled upon three rather opulent Celtic graves, containing a woman flanked on each side by a young girl, which is interesting because Boudica had 2 daughters and we don’t know what became of them either.

Nero. The last of the Julio-Claudian emperors of Rome, he was deposed in 68 AD as a rebellion over his taxation schemes escalated. He fled to a villa on the outskirts of Rome where, lacking the bottle to top himself, he ordered a servant to kill him. He was buried in the Mausoleum of the Domitii Ahenobarbi, which stood in the Pincian Hill part of Rome (NE of the centre) close to or on the site of the present Villa Borghese; however the traditional and recently restored "Tomb of Nero" actually dates to a later period.

Alaric I, king of the Visigoths, was campaigning in the far south of Italy when he died in 410. To build his tomb the course of a river was diverted using barrier walls, and then his vault was built under the original riverbed, before the barriers were dismantled and the river returned to its original course. The river is not named in archive records but it is thought to be the Busento near modern Cosenza. A certain rather curious feature in the riverbed in this region could be his despoiled tomb. Others believe his body was returned to his homeland and buried under the Danube.

King Arthur: Owyn Ddandgwyn born AD 460, ruled as King of Gwynedd from AD 490 although he had been Dux Bellorum from 488. Killed in battle (at Gamlann, which differs by only a single letter from the Camlann of Arthurian legend) in AD 519. Arthur (Arth-ursus, (the bear)) was his battle name. Owyn's father Enniaun Yrth carried the battle name Uthr pen Dragon (terrible head dragon). Probably buried in one of the tumuli near Berth Pool (Baschurch) in Shropshire.

Merlin. There were two. One, called Merlin Wylt, was a lot younger than Arthur (Owyn Ddantgwyn) and was allegedly a seer and bard to the court of King Gwendollau, a Brythonic king who ruled a kingdom just south of the Roman Wall in what is now north-western England. In very high regard, he was given effective command of Gwenddolau's armies at the Battle of Arfderydd (Arthuret), located near modern Carwinley near Carlisle, when the kingdom was invaded by the sons of the neighboring king Eliffer of Ebrauc to the north in what is now southwest Scotland. Alas, he made a complete pig's ear of the battle and lost heavily.

The Annales Cambriae (now in the British Library in London) says, for the year AD 573, that "Gwendollau is slain and Merlin went mad". Losing all his cred, he fled to the north and took refuge in Coed Celyddon, the Caledonian forest in the region of the Solway Firth, where he disappears from recorded history. However there showed up, at the same time he disappeared and in pretty much the same place, a naked, rambling wild man, called Lailoken, who hated Christianity, oddly had high connections and seemed extremely wise despite a rather alarming penchant for running around starkers in the woods and talking to the wild animals. Gawain, king of Gododdin (now Lothian in Scotland) was the great grandson of Typaun ap Cunedda, who had been the brother of Enniaun Yrth, the Uthr Pen-Dragon of real history, and actually knew the madman quite well. However in that same year, 573, Lailoken also vanishes from history and both his and Merlin’s fate remains unknown.

The other Merlin, Emrys Myrddin, lived much earlier, in the latter half of the previous century, was older than Owyn Ddantgwyn and seems to have been a wise advisor or mentor of both Ddantgwyn’s father Uthr Pen Dragon (Enniaun Yrth) and his predecessor Vortigern. He may actually have been Ambrosius Aurelius himself but as yet we don’t know enough.


Ivar the Boneless. Invaded England in 865 at the head of the Great Heathen Army after his father, Ragnar Lothbrok, had been captured by King Aelle of Northumbria and, so it is said, thrown into a pit full of snakes to die. Landing in East Anglia, who quickly parleyed, he marched through Lincolnshire (whose local inhabitants legged it; to this day the Yorkshire folk call them the Yellowbellies) and crossed the Humber before capturing York. Then in 870, unusually for the time, he quit. Resigned. Tendered his notice. Jacked it in. Handing over the Great Heathen Army to his brothers, he moved to Ireland where he may have assumed a local lordship in the Dublin area and died suddenly around 873 but the whereabouts of his body is a mystery.

Note: In the 1958 movie "The Vikings", which loosely follows his story, his name is changed to Einar and he is played by Kirk Douglas.

Alfred the Great. Probably crapped himself to death (piles/the Elvis Presley Effect) on 26 October 899, whereupon he was interred in the Old Minster at Winchester. However 4 years later he was moved to the New Minster, and then to Hyde Abbey in 1110.  This abbey was destroyed at the Dissolution in 1539 and its graves lost, to be rediscovered in 1788 by criminals building themselves a new jailhouse. At this point many bones were dug up and scattered when the criminals nicked the lead coffins, but when the jail was demolished in the late 1840s some bones, which may or may not have been the original ones, came to light. These were taken to nearby St. Bartholomew's church where in 2013/14 they were radiocarbon dated -- to the 14th century, 500 years after Alfred, with the exception of a pelvic fragment which dated to roughly the correct period.

 

 

Alfred the Great probably went the same way as Elvis Presley --
his arse backfired due to a blockage.

 

 

Harald III Hardrada (Sigurdssen) was killed at the Battle of Stamford Brig in Yorkshire, England on 25 September 1066 (JC) and his body returned to Norway the following year for burial in the Mary Church in Nidaros in Trondheim.  He was subsequently (about 1170) moved to the Helgeseter Priory which burned down in 1564. Some quarrying took place at that site in the early 1600s, which completely destroyed all the visible remains, but some ruins, in the proximity of which lies Harald's grave site, survive under the local road which was subsequently built south of Nidelven. In September 2006 the Municipality of Trondheim announced a plan to search for and recover Harald's remains but a month later the plan was abandoned.

Harold II was the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England and ruled from January to October 1066. After the Battle of Hastings on 14 October his body was hacked to pieces by 4 Norman knights, one of whom was almost certainly Horse Chestnut Bill (William the Conqueror) himself. Harold’s mum, obviously distraught at the news that her son had just been chopped up, asked Bill for the stiff and offered to pay him Harold’s weight in gold for it, but Bill declined, no doubt because he didn’t want Harold to be buried in some shrine which might form a focus for reactionism or pilgrimage.
.
In 1954 an Anglo-Saxon grave was discovered in a church in Bosham near Chichester, a village strongly associated with Harold. The grave contained a stiff with no head and half a leg, which is just how his body ended up according to historical accounts, but permission for an exhumation was refused in 2003 on the ground that there had not been enough supporting work done (i.e. the tracing of relatives for DNA) to identify the remains.

Meanwhile a legend has long persisted that Harold was buried in the church of Waltham Holy Cross in Essex, which Harold himself had refounded in 1060.

Anyway if anyone should be out walking the dog in the Senlac Hill area and chance upon a bit of leg, or for that matter a whole one, please do notify the authorities. Bill almost certainly kept the head.

Hereward the Wake was a dispossessed Saxon landowner and English lord whose land was used by Horse Chestnut Bill to pay the Norman henchmen who'd helped him to conquer England in 1066. Hereward led a revolt in the fens and marshes of Ely, was betrayed and captured, but then escaped -- and vanished from history. There was a rumour going around that he became a pal of Bill’s but there’s no known record of his lands being returned or of any others being granted to him.

William Aethling was the son and heir of the English King Henry I. On 25 November 1120 he set sail with his friends, a group of rowdy drunken hoo-hars, in the White Ship, a prestigious, state of the art vessel, from Barfleur, Normandy, for England. The king himself had already sailed, and the Aethling and the other snooties on the White Ship were pressing the captain, Thomas FitzStephen, to go faster in order to overtake the king's vessel and reach England first, and also to take a more northern route cos it was quicker. Unfortunately, in the darkness they collided with the Quillebœuf, about the only rock anywhere in sight along their entire course, and sank with only 2 survivors out of a total compliment of about 300. William's body, together with his half-sister Matilda's, was never found.

Note the parallels between the White Ship and the White Star liner Titanic almost 800 years later. Both carried prominent passengers who pressed their captain to go faster in order to meet their schedules at the expense of safety, and both were the latest state of the art vessels, which soon sank after a collision, taking dozens of top snooties to the bottom.


Edgar the Aethling ("The king who never was") was the last male heir of the House of Wessex, the original Royal Family of England and the last Royal Family who were actually English. Edgar, the grandson of King Edmund Ironside, was sent into exile in Hungary during  Canute’s reign. He returned just before the Norman conquest and was proclaimed king when the Normans took the crown in 1066. He spent the rest of his life intriguing and adventuring first against and then with the Normans, siding in the main with Robert Curthose, the shunned and cheated elder brother of William II Rufus. He died in or sometime after 1125 but the location of his grave is not known.


Henry I died in Normandy on 1 December 1135 (JC) after gorging himself upon "a surfeit of lampreys", and most of him (except his entrails which remained there) was brought back to England and interred in Reading Abbey. However the abbey was destroyed at the Dissolution and his tomb was lost. The part of the abbey where he is believed to repose is now either the car park, or the reception building of the local nick.

King Stephen was King of England from 1135 to 1154, having seized the crown on the death of his uncle Henry I. Henry had an heir, Matilda, but Steve capitalised on the fact that she was a stuck-up cow and nobody liked her. He reigned 19 years before dying of a stomach malady (probably not poison; he’d been going for a while), and was buried in Faversham Abbey in Kent.
However the building was demolished shortly after the Dissolution and his tomb was lost. There was a legend that his remains had been thrown into Faversham Creek in Henry VIII’s time, and indeed an excavation of the abbey in 1964 discovered his (empty) tomb, but another rumour says that the remains had been reinterred in the nearby church of St. Mary of Charity, where a tomb (with no inscription) is said to be his.

Soldiers of King John: Killed crossing the Wellstream (now the river Nene) in Lincolnshire on October 12, 1216 (JC). See file. In this same disaster John lost two entire sets of coronation regalia, in addition to the coin he was carrying to pay his troops.

I discovered a tidal bore, and that the tide had been going in the opposite direction to what historians believe (which has effectively wrong-footed just about every search which has been made) -- hence a new search area (see that page).

Arthur of Brittany was the true heir to the throne of England after the death of Richard I in 1199. In 1202, while besieging his granny (Eleanor of Aquitaine), Arthur was captured by John's barons and imprisoned at Falaise. In 1203 Arthur was moved to Rouen where he was last seen alive later that year.


Khan, Genghis. Was out riding one day with an adjutant, in what were then called the Bejun Boldok mountains in Mongolia. Resting at a beautiful spot in the foothills of a mountain which was then called Burkhan Kaldun (but which today cannot be identified), he fell in love with the place and ordered that when he died it should be the site of his tomb. This was done (in 1227) after which, in legend at least, all evidence of human presence at the place was subsequently obliterated by running thousands of horses over the site, then planting trees, and then executing all concerned. However, we know (file) that around 25 of Khan's successors were also buried at the same place, including his grandson Kublai Khan, and so someone must therefore have known the location. This of course always bodes ill for anyone hoping to find tombs still intact or with bodies still in them; the historical record for finding such tombs is, frankly, nothing short of dismal, the discovery of Tutankhamun in Egypt in 1922 being a very rare exception, (but even he had been broken into except that the robbers had been caught red handed).

 

 

Genghis Khan went to extreme lengths to keep his burial place secret. But 25 of his successors
were buried at the same location so somebody must have known.
However the place is now lost.


Caution: Mainly due to the wealth which was allegedly buried with Genghis Khan (12 to 20 entire sets of regalia from his various conquests) the Mongol authorities are extremely sensitive about parties going into the search areas. Much bureaucracy and red tape, and almost no chance of securing permission.

Hood, Robert. (There were two, whose details were later fused together to create the legendary Robin of book and screen).

The earliest of these was called Robert Fitz Odo, Robert Odd, or Robin Odd, Hod or Hood, Robin being then as now a nickname for Robert. He was Lord of Loxley village in Warwickshire in the days of Richard the Lionheart and Prince (later king) John. His lands were confiscated whereupon he took refuge in Sherwood Forest, relying on robbery for subsistence, but after a while his lands were restored to him. He must have had a band of followers, but their names are lost.

The second character is more interesting. An ordinary yeoman, "Robert Hood of Wakefield" has in real history a very strikingly similar archive record to the Robin Hood of legend, many of his exploits matching point for point those of the legendary hero as outlined in ancient ballads.

In the earliest ballads and legends, Robin Hood was an expert archer who wore Lincoln green, was married to Marian, haunted Barnsdale Forest in Yorkshire and was buried at Kirklees Priory near Leeds, where his cousin, one Elizabeth de Staynton, was prioress.

In actual archive records, Robert Hood of Wakefield had a wife called Matilda who changed her name to Marian when they took refuge in the forest in 1323/4 (Maid Marian is an obvious alias which means Virgin Mary; the legendary Robin Hood doted upon the Holy Virgin); and she had a cousin called Elizabeth de Staynton who was, none other, than the prioress of Kirklees Priory.

This Robert Hood (referred to as Robyn Hode in the Exchequer records in London) was wanted by the authorities because he had fought on the side of the rebellious Earl of Lancaster at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322 as one of the earl's Lincoln-green jacketed archers. Having had his property confiscated (see Wakefield court rolls for 1324), he fled into Barnsdale Forest in Yorkshire (then a northern extension of Sherwood Forest), where he organised the other fleeing archers into a disciplined group, which made such a nuisance of themselves that the military payroll on its way up to Scotland (these were the days of Edward II and Robert the Bruce), went missing twice and had to be double-guarded from Tickhill to York. Official reason: "Propter Barnsdale". He had a band of followers, some of whose names we might recognise: John the Little, William Scathelok (called Will Scarlet in another source), and the Earl of Lancaster’s own personal chaplain, Friar Thomas Tuck, among others.

The burial ground at Kirklees (where the legendary Robin dies) is still there. Elizabeth de Staynton's headstone was found in 1706, but in terms of modern excavation nothing has been done or attempted. A grave nearby (purporting to be Robin Hood's) is a Victorian forgery which stands on unbroken ground, Elizabeth de Staynton having said that she actually buried him by the roadside outside the priory (to reassure travellers who would pass that remote way), under an ornate stone which has since disappeared. Meantime at faraway Loxley there is an ornate gravestone purporting to be Robin Hood’s -- but which matches point for point this roadside stone of the other Robin at Kirklees, as depicted in an ancient work, leading modern researchers to wonder what the hell has been going on.

Glyndwr, Owain was the last Prince of Wales who was actually Welsh (wasn't he, Charles). Leading a revolt against Henry IV in 1400, he was eventually defeated whereupon he disappeared from history; he was never found despite the many rewards posted and pardons offered. Last seen alive in 1412.

Dracula, Vlad Tepes III (the Impaler). Great Romanian hero (even today in Romania, he can do no wrong), defender of Christianity in his lands (Transylvania in Wallachia) during the time of the Ottomans, he is basically the reason modern Romanians are still white, rather than olive skinned as the descendants of the Romans became. He also founded Bucharest, the Romanian capital. Won many victories over the Ottomans. Killed in battle in 1476, his decapitated body was buried somewhere under the monastery at Comana which he himself had founded in 1461. However in 1589 the monastery was demolished to ground level and rebuilt from scratch, and his tomb was lost. In the 1970s archaeologists recovered a headless body from the monastery, but it is thought that Dracula was one of several such cases and so the body recovered is probably not the Draculean Stiff.
Some of his modern descendants are known, notably Prince Ottomar Rudolphe Vlad Dracula Kretzulesco, who lives in Germany outside Berlin, and King Charles of the UK. The latter once joked on Romanian tv, "Transylvania is in my blood. The genealogy shows I am descended from Vlad the Impaler, so I do have a bit of a stake in the country.”

But regarding the headless skeleton a mtDNA sequence has yet to be traced.

 

National hero Dracula was a champion of Christianity. After founding Bucharest
he drove the Ottoman Turks, who were Islamic, from his lands.
This ‘vampire’ was actually buried in the Catholic monastery which he founded.




Edward of Middleham was the only legitimate son of Richard III and died at Middleham in Yorkshire in April 1484 at the age of 9. He is thought to have been buried either at the church of Saints Mary and Alkelda at Middleham, or the church of St. Helen and the Holy Cross at Sheriff Hutton, where a tomb dating to approximately the right period and containing an effigy of a child still exists. This tomb was eventually dismantled at its original (unknown) location within the church and its constituent slabs stacked against the wall for some considerable time, before subsequently being reassembled elsewhere in the church. The coffin buried beneath the tomb's original location is therefore lost.

Sheriff Hutton's church also contains the Neville Chapel, which houses the remains of many of Edward of Middleham's maternal and paternal Neville ancestors. It might appear odd if he were not actually resting among them.


Edward V. Disappeared presumed murdered along with his younger brother in 1483. Remains found in 1674 were presumed his and were interred in Westminster Abbey, but in 1789 when the tomb of his father Edward IV (at Windsor) was accidentally broken into by workmen, the lead coffins of 2 mysterious children were discovered in a partition vault. They were not touched and the tomb was resealed.

It was never realistic to believe that the bodies were originally buried under a staircase in the Tower of London, as has been believed; the stench of the decaying corpses would hardly evade the nostrils of hundreds of Tower staff living and working right there, even if they had not seen or heard anything. A simpler and more private solution for the murderer would be to lock up the Windsor Chapel for the night and bury the bodies with their parents. Consider also the Catholic conscience of the guilty party in the matter of deciding how to dispose of the bodies.

 

Cabot, John (Giovanni Caboto) was the Italian sailor who embarked on exploratory voyages to the New World for the English king Henry VII. He was thought to have been lost on his 1498 voyage, but recently discovered archive documents place him alive in London in 1500. However it is not known what became of him or where he was buried.

Wolsey, Thomas. Roman Catholic cardinal and T. Rex's* Chancellor, he was en route from York to London to stand trial for treason in 1530, when on 29 November that year, and just a couple of days short of arriving in London, he died. Rather conveniently, some might say. As he just happened to be in the Leicester area at that point, they buried him there, despite his having no significant or justifiable connection whatsoever with the place (Ricardians this may sound familiar). His place of burial, the Abbey of St. Mary de Pratis, or Leicester Abbey, was  destroyed at the Dissolution in 1538 and his tomb was lost.

* Henry VIII. I like to call Henry VIII T. Rex (T for Tudor and Rex = king). Sounds rather appropriate.

Sontheil, Ursula (aka Mother Shipton) was a prophetess and seer who reputedly first saw the light of day in a cave just outside Knaresborough, Yorkshire in c.1488. Most of her prophesies, however, were fabricated after the fact, notably by a 19th century gentleman named Richard Head (yes, the original Dick Head, seen here long before he became the pub landlord in Bottom), but enough of her stuff came true during her lifetime to put the spookers on everybody, so when she died in 1561 her farsighted stiff wasn’t exactly considered kosher for a Christian burial, so she was interred by the roadside somewhere between Clifton and York. 

Dona Luisa de Melo Coutinho. This young 16-year-old girl was at the centre of one of the most tragic maritime disasters ever. In 1593 she was returning to Portugal from Goa, India (her uncle was effectively Viceroy there), aboard a treasure-laden ship called the Santo Alberto, when it was wrecked on the coast of Natal in southern Africa. Managing to get ashore, she and other survivors had to walk 900 miles through hostile Zulu territory, and after many ordeals she at length arrived at Maputo in Mozambique, where she then boarded a tremendous carrack called the Cinco Chagas, a floating castle destined for Lisbon with almost 100 tons of gold and 25 tons of jewels (mainly rubies in boxes) and jewelry in her holds, and hundreds of slaves chained on every deck.
Disease broke out on the crowded vessel, from bad water taken aboard at Luanda (together with more slaves), which spread rapidly throughout the ship's compliment. After many months of intense tropical heat, the stricken vessel drew near the Azores, where it was then attacked by three English warships.
Despite the state of the passengers and crew, the battle which followed was epic. The death toll on both sides was staggering and the English, at length deciding that they could not take the Chagas, set fire to her instead, torching her simultaneously at the bow and the stern. The fire ran over the ship, and uniting made a tremendous flame, in the midst of which the Portuguese jumped overboard in great numbers, only to be lanced to death by the English who came among them in small launches, turning the sea red with blood and attracting sharks in large numbers.
It became clear that the only people being spared were women who were stripping naked before jumping from the ship, no doubt having decided that rape was now a fate better than death. Dona Luiza faced the same dilemma and, still fully clothed, she bravely made her choice. Tying herself to her mum with a sash of St Francis, they went to the opposite side of the ship from the English and, climbing over the rail, they leapt into the sea. Their bodies, still joined together, washed ashore on Faial island the next day, where they were buried em sepulturas remotas.
The Chagas burned on until the fire reached the powder magazines, which blew her apart in a tremendous blast, sending her remains, and her cargo, cascading to the bottom.
Alas, Dona Luiza is no longer remembered, except by the treasure hunting community who would love to find her grave as it would tell them off which part of the coast the Chagas sank.
I myself would love to find her if only to finally take her home.

Drake, Francis. Died aboard his ship in 1596 and was buried at sea in a lead coffin (probably sheets of lead wrapped around his corpse and sealed with folded seams; these lead sheets were readily available on galleons as they would be nailed to the outside of the hull to protect the timbers from shipworm) in Nombre de Dios Bay not far from Portobelo, Panama. Despite a dedicated search by divers, Sir Francis remains elusive. However, the divers have mainly focussed their search in the area around Buena Ventura Island, which is mentioned in the original report of his death, despite the fact that the report actually says, "....Sir Francis died of the bloody flux, right off the island of Buena Ventura and some six leagues at sea, and now rests with the Lord" (italics mine). In other words. he's in dark water 20 statute miles offshore, which is actually good news rather than bad as the coffin will be on an open, level seabed instead of having been engulfed and buried beneath tons of coral as it would in shallower waters.

Hudson, Henry (of Hudson Bay fame) was the English explorer who discovered, among other things, the deep water harbour of what is now New York. However, he found it for the Dutch East India Company who aptly named it New Amsterdam. In 1611 he and 7 others were set adrift in a small boat by mutineers in Hudson Bay. None of them were seen again.

Frith, Mary (aka Moll Cutpurse) was a notorious highwaywoman and money launderer who thrived under the very noses of (London) authorities who were seemingly unable to bring her to justice. Born abt 1584, she opened a jewelry and trinket shop, at which she would receive the goods stolen by highwaymen who would come to her back door and sell them back to their dispossessed owners who would come in the front. Her fame, or notoriety, spread so far and wide that people who'd had the misfortune of being stuck up on the highway stopped advertising for the return of their goods and just went round to Moll's instead.

Moll herself evaded justice by maintaining that she was merely a trader who had no way of knowing that the goods offered her were in any way dodgy, and explained the fact that people seemed to know where to go to get their stuff back by theorising that the highwaymen and their victims had developed an "understanding" of where to redeem their jewels (they would part with them with a minimum of fuss if they knew they would see them again) and that she was being used in that regard without consultation from either party.

 

 

Moll Cutpurse would have been expelled from
St. Trinian’s.

 

After working as a procurer and a pimp, she took to highway robbery herself, famously sticking up Gen. Sir Thomas Fairfax, after which she was captured and paid a 2 grand bribe for her freedom, and is also credited with spreading the habit of smoking to womankind by smoking so extensively (and publicly) that she kicked off a new trend.

She went mad, went sensible again, then dropped dead in Fleet Street, London in July 1659 aged abt 75. In accordance with her will she was buried in the St. Bride churchyard in Fleet Street, face downwards with her backside protruding up, to symbolize her opinion of mankind. However, her fine marble tomb was destroyed in the Fire of London in 1666 and the site of her grave is now unknown.

Note: (i) As GPR technology improves, the Archaeological Identification of the Moll will probably prove a piece of cake. Hers will be the only skeleton which is mooning at her discoverers. However most of the old churchyard has now disappeared under buildings.

(ii) She was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, despite being worse than Defoe's character by One Mile.

D' Artagnan, Charles (de Batz). The only one of the "Four Musketeers" who actually existed, he was born abt 1611 and performed covert espionage work for Louis XIV who eventually made him captain-lieutenant (effectively commander) of the Musketeers. He then retired behind a desk with the Governorship of Lille, but was not popular and returned to active duty. He was killed at the siege of Maastricht in the Netherlands in June 1673 by a musket ball which hit him in the neck. He is believed to have been buried in the church of Saint Peter and Paul in Wolder in what is now the south west suburbs of Maastricht, close to the Belgian border, but no one now knows where abouts in the church he was laid to rest.


Swift Nick (John Nevison), born in 1639 in Wortley village near Sheffield, Yorkshire, was the archetypal gentleman (to begin with) highwayman, credited with such statements as, “My lady, your beautiful neck has no need of the jewels which adorn it”. It was he, and not the infamous Dick Turpin, who rode from London (Gad's Hill in Kent) to York overnight, to establish an alibi for a robbery. He was captured and imprisoned a number of times, always escaping, lastly by faking his death of the plague whereupon a doctor friend of his carried him away for burial, and after which he scared the living daylights out of people by white-powdering his face, rubbing his eyes til they were bright red and then sticking them up as his own ghost. Predating Turpin by half a century, he was eventually arrested in a pub in Castleford, and hanged at York in 1684. He was buried in St Mary's churchyard there but his grave is now lost.

The residents of Wortley village, not known for the accuracy of the rumours they spread, have completely garbled Swift Nick's story into, "Dick Turpin is buried in Wortley graveyard".

Morgan, Henry. Buccaneer, Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica and boozer extraordinaire, he died probably from tuberculosis in 1688 and was buried in the Palisadoes cemetery in Port Royal. Unfortunately, his grave was subducted beneath the sea in the earthquake of 1692 and remains undiscovered in approximately 30 feet of water.

 

 

Captain Sir Henry Morgan. The original – and ultimate – hellraiser,
he hadn’t been in his grave long, before it was plunged into the
depths when the earth opened up and tried to spit him back out.

 

 

Caution: The geological fault responsible, the Plantain Garden fault, is about ready to go again, at about the same estimated magnitude as the 1692 event.


Avery (or Every), Henry. A particularly daring English pirate, and economically the most successful one in English history, in 1696 he pulled off the Job of the Century (he knocked off an Arabian sultan's treasure ship containing almost his entire wealth) -- and promptly vanished. Despite a worldwide search and an enormous price on his head, he was never seen again.  A trail leads from the Indian Ocean via the American Colonies to Ireland and then Devon, but he never flogged that lot in Tavistock High Street so he probably hoofed it again. There is some evidence that he returned to the American Colonies.

Kidd, William was a Scottish-born sea captain and businessman who lived in Wall Street in colonial New York. In 1696 in the aftermath of the Avery spectacular, Kidd, who had a questionable seafaring past, was commissioned by William III of England to clear the Indian Ocean of pirates. However he appears to have had a rather mild "now now lads" personality and seemed quite incapable of controlling his rather motley crew, eventually barricading himself in his cabin while they ran amok on the high seas. The Mogul of India, already stotting at King William over the Avery debacle, then threatened to erase the East India Company from existence, whereupon Kidd was arrested, charged with piracy and murder (he was no pirate, but he had actually killed one of his crew, William Moore, by clanking him over the head with a bucket), and very publicly hanged in chains at Execution Dock, London, in May 1701.

His remains were probably thrown piecemeal into the Thames immediately adjacent to the gibbet, although an American collector claims to have his skull in his possession. MtDNA is a possibility for identification of bones/said skull, for in addition to (tenuous evidence for) a son he definitely had 2 daughters. However, no attempt has been made to trace their descendants.

The River Thames is tidal and at low water it is possible to walk over the ground adjacent to the old gibbet site. However, a DNA profile is essential before we proceed, as his bones will have to be separated from the many others lost there.


Turpin, Richard.  Highwayman, larcen and murderer. Described as "a commonplace ruffian", he was hanged in April 1739 at York Tyburn (now the York racecourse) for horse stealing, which ironically was about the least serious of his pursuits. Allegedly buried in St. George's churchyard in York, his body was stolen by body snatchers but was quickly recovered and reinterred, this time with the addition of quicklime. There is a monument ("grave") in the churchyard, but the actual grave remains undiscovered.


Cook, Captain James, was killed during a commotion with the natives of Hawaii on February 14, 1779. The natives took away his body and, in accordance with their custom, dismembered it, stripped off the flesh, then passed the various parts of it around the Hawaiian villages. However the British demanded the return of the remains, and 3 days later most of the stiff was handed over to Captain Clerke, who had been terrorising the natives with cannon barrages and shore parties going around burning villages. The Hawaiian chief Kalaniopu'u had still kept the long bones and the jaw, but Clerk placed the rest in a weighted box, and lowered them into Kealakekua Bay. There is however no proof that the remains handed back to the British were indeed Cook’s.

Christian, Fletcher. Led the infamous mutiny on the HMAV Bounty near Tahiti in April 1789, and settled with some of the mutineers on Pitcairn Island after discovering that it had been inaccurately charted and would therefore be difficult for search vessels to find. Sure enough, not a single vessel happened that remote way until 1808. The Bounty was stripped and then burned. They had taken with them some Tahitian women as wives, and men as slaves to work their land. However, after 4 years the native men argued (mainly over the women) with their new masters and during the resultant fracas Christian was shot and killed (20 September 1793) before being buried "close to a pond, by his cottage". His wife Maimiti (later buried beside him) described these events in minute detail. Today the house is long gone but the site is well known and a nearby depression in the ground is all that remains of the pond. Rumours that Christian returned to England (in what?) are completely baseless.

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. Died of unknown but medical causes at his home in Vienna at the grand old age of 35 on 5 December 1791. Completely skint, in contrast with the writers of good and appreciated music who seldom are (I almost expired having lost the will to live during a performance of Mozart's piano concerto number 18 in b-flat major, and the piano player, with whom I went to school, later collapsed and died), Mozart was interred in a "common grave" 2 days later in the St. Marx cemetery outside the city. These graves were not communal as is often stated; they were single graves but alas were used again (excavated/turned over) every 10 years and in any event the precise location was never recorded.

Crockett, David (he hated ’Davy’). Taken alive after the siege of the Alamo at San Antonio in 1836, Crockett and a few others were summarily executed on the orders of Generalissimo Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Their bodies were cremated and the ashes turned over to Juan Seguin (who later became alcalde of San Antonio), who placed them in a wooden chest and took them away for secret burial "in a peach grove". Due to the subsequent expansion of the town this place, wherever it was, would almost certainly now lie in suburban San Antonio.

Mike here is a close friend of the family of Santa Anna and they gave me access to maps of San Antonio dating to that precise period. There are a number of places on these maps which could contain the site, one of which, intriguingly, is adjacent to Seguin's old residence. Snr Lopez de Santa Anna also showed me a letter from Snr Seguin to Gen. Santa Anna, thanking him and briefly describing the burial place, but the city has changed very considerably since those days and the area referred to could be any one of a number of possibilities.

Franklin, Sir John was a British explorer who set sail in May 1845 in search of the fabled north-west passage. Neither he, his 2 ships nor any of his party were heard from again until 2014. In 1848 the Royal Navy, realizing that Franklin would by then be out of food and supplies, sent out the first of several search parties.  In 1850 the graves of three of the Franklin crew were found on Beechey Island, northwest of Baffin Island, and throughout the 1850s hundreds of artifacts were discovered, spread out over a trail something like 100 miles in length.

Other items were recovered from the Inuit, who reported seeing 2 ships trapped in the ice, and white men "walking south". The natives also reported that the white men were resorting to cannibalism, news which was not accepted in Britain at the time but which has since been confirmed. A diary was also recovered, which somberly stated that Franklin had died (on the 11th June 1847).

On 7 September 2014 one of Franklins ships, HMS Erebus, was rediscovered under 30 feet of water. The other ship, HMS Terror, was located in September 2016. The location of both ships is being kept secret. However there remains no news of Franklin himself. He had not found the northwest passage. One of the search parties, however, did. With regard to Franklin himself, however, presumably there won't be much left to find if they've scoffed him.

Briggs, Benjamin. Captain of the fabled Mary Celeste, he disappeared along with his wife Elizabeth, their 2-year-old daughter Sophia and the rest of his crew on 25 November 1872 off Santa Maria island in the Azores. Their completely intact ship was found abandoned on 4 December with sails up but dishevelled, and with the lifeboat missing, and none of the ship's compliment were ever seen again. The cargo was neat alcohol and 2 of the cargo hatches were found to be open. Much subsequent (and often sensational) theorising, but Mike here thinks they detected a buildup of explosive alcoholic fumes, opened the hatches to ventilate, and meantime sat in the lifeboat, tethered to the ship on the end of a long rope -- when it snapped. My research then discovered that, sure enough, there had been a frayed rope trailing the ship when it was found.

They could be anywhere really; a job for a deep-sea submersible and a stupendous amount of luck. Don't even think about it. The Mary Celeste subsequently changed hands a number of times before being deliberately wrecked in January 1885 on a reef off Haiti (insurance job), where she was eventually rediscovered by Clive Cussler (the author of "Raise the Titanic") in August 2001.

Note: The Mary Celeste was a very capable vessel; through charmed luck rather than design you couldn't have sunk her with a howitzer. The Unsinkable Molly Brown in command would have been a complete win situation. By comparison, however, the personal histories of her various captains make very sorry reading indeed.

Crazy Horse was a chief of the Oglala Sioux, who led the Native Americans in the Battle of the Little Bighorn against Lt. Colonel George Custer and his 7th US Cavalry on June 25, 1876, about a third of which (Custer’s own detachment) he completely wiped out in less than an hour. Due to subsequent American reprisals, he surrendered the following year and was sent to Fort Robinson, Nebraska, where on 5 September he was bayonetted during a scuffle with his captors. He died later that night. For a month his parents excarnated his body on a scaffold at Camp Sheridan in northwest Nebraska, before removing his remains from there and burying them at an undisclosed location.

McCarty, Henry (Billy the Kid), was a teenage outlaw and gunman, shot to death in July 1881 at the age of 21 on a cattle ranch outside Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He was buried in the local cemetery and over the years a succession of crude wooden markers were erected at the spot (they kept being stolen), but then in 1904 the cemetery was ravaged by a bad flood, which washed away every marker in the cemetery with 4 feet of water before eventually subsiding (imagine a featureless, muddy flood plain, slowly drying out), leaving many corpses partially exposed. Using the corners of nearby buildings as reference points, the locals estimated the position of Henry's grave to within a few yards, at which a new stone was erected -- which again kept getting nicked and subsequently replaced with a new one, in a process which continued by and large into recent times, to the point that a metal cage has now been erected over the latest one. The original grave, though, remains lost despite its proximity to the modern stone.

 

 

Billy the Kid (Henry McCarty). Orphaned at 15 and clueless as to how to
fend for himself in the Wild West, he was in trouble in no time.
He was mediocre with a gun but a born escapologist,
and grabbed every chance to go straight but his past kept
catching up with him.
His grave disappeared under a flood.

 

 

Note: His mum, Katherine McCarty Antrim, died in 1874 and was buried in Silver City NM. It has been suggested that a DNA comparison could identify her son (who also had an unusual upper teeth pattern), but unfortunately the cemetery she was buried in was sold as private land and all the stiffs, including Kath, were removed to another cemetery just outside the town and buried haphazardly, with almost no records being kept. There is a new gravestone, ostensibly for tourists, but no evidence whatsoever that Kath's the one under it. Henry also had a brother, Joseph, who died in Colorado in 1930, but no one claimed his body which consequently ended up being dissected in a medical school. New relatives therefore need to be traced; Henry was born in New York City on the Lower East Side and so that would presumably be the starting point for this research, if anyone might wish to rise to the task.

Cantelo, William, was a British inventor, credited with inventing the first true machine gun, an honour now given to Hiram Maxim, an American who emigrated to the UK before making the same invention. Cantelo disappeared mysteriously from Southampton, England, in the 1880s and was never seen again; Maxim invented his machine gun, which looked astonishingly similar, in 1895. Cantelo's two sons were so taken by the resemblance between the two men that when Maxim arrived in the UK they thought their missing father had returned under a new guise. Research has shown, however, that the two have different, verifiable origins. Cantelo's fate remains a mystery.

Parker, Robert L, and Longabaugh, Harry A. (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) were holed up in a lodging house in San Vicente, Bolivia, on November 7, 1908, as a few of the local alcalde's men and 3 soldiers surrounded the place. In the gunfight which ensued, one of the pair killed the other and then himself. Their bodies were buried in an unmarked grave in the local cemetery, close to that of a miner named Gustav Zimmer.  Michael here has family connections to Cassidy (My g-g-g grandfather worked with Max Parker (Cassidy's father), and my 3rd cousin married a lineal descendant of Cassidy's sister) but alas there is nothing in my family to further illuminate the details of Cassidy's death. Some limited (and unsuccessful) excavation work has been done by forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow.

Scott, Robert F. Died in March 1912 along with 2 of his companions (Wilson and Bowers) on his return from the South Pole. Buried at a precisely recorded location on the Ross Ice Shelf, their grave (a tent which was collapsed over them) has been steadily sinking through the ice which in turn is moving (at a known rate) towards the Ross Sea. Bodies would be exceptionally well preserved. 2 others, Evans and Oates, are also lost in the same region, Oates extremely nearby. Oates was never properly buried. Many believe that all should be returned to England.

Note: GPR and Sonar. Solid targets surrounded by thousands of feet of pure ice in every direction. This may be easier than it looks.

Nungesser, Charles and Coli, Francois were a couple of French aviators who set off to be the first to fly across the Atlantic (from mainland Europe to mainland North America; the so-called "full crossing") in 1927. Beating Charles Linbergh's epic flight by just 10 days, they and their plane mysteriously disappeared, however, on reaching - if indeed they did reach - the North American coast. Wreckage found 200 miles offshore is thought to have drifted out to sea from further inshore, but may not be from their plane. Theories include their being shot down by a group of Maine bootleggers, who thought the airborne patrol had tumbled them and were expecting to hear the "games up" loudspeaker at any moment. Nungesser and Coli were never found.

Amundsen, Roald. The first person to reach the South Pole (1911), he disappeared in the Barent's Sea in June 1928 when he crashed his Latham-47 flying boat while on a search and rescue mission. Some wreckage was found off the Tromso coast.

Kiss, Bela. A Hungarian serial killer responsible for the deaths of 24 women in his home town, which he killed by biting their necks and sucking the blood out of them, he went off to fight in World War I in 1914 before the police detected his crimes. They subsequently traced him to a Serbian hospital in 1916, but he stuffed a dead body in his bed and legged it before they arrived. In 1920 a French Foreign Legionary called Hoffman, who was a dead ringer for Kiss (who in turn had often used that particular alias), boasted that he was very nifty with a garrotte, then quickly deserted hours before the police arrived to investigate. In 1932 American police learned that he was working as a janitor in New York, but again he hoofed it just before they arrived to arrest him. He was never seen again.

Earhart, Amelia. American aviatrix. Not the best of fliers (she was very good at getting lost, particularly one time over Italy, but she won the hearts of the people because she was dedicated and, above all in aviation at that time, female). Disappeared in the vicinity of Howland Island in the Pacific in July 1937 on a round the world flight. Her navigator, Fred Noonan, was trying to home in on signals being transmitted from a support ship when their Lockheed Electra ran out of fuel.

There have, almost inevitably, been many theories concerning their disappearance, ranging from being captured by the Japanese to being marooned on an island, but realistically they probably went down in approximately 17,000 feet of water off Howland Island. Despite many searches the plane remains elusive. If they went down with the aircraft, their remains will have dissolved due to the high water pressure. However, if they abandoned the aircraft at the surface (they had no life raft), then hopelessly fighting sharks in the middle of the ocean would have been the last action of their lives.

The search area might have to be enlarged a bit due to the fact that (i) Howland was at that time charted in error by about 5 miles, and (ii) Fred Noonan, the navigator, spent most of his life as drunk as a skunk.

Johnson, Amy was an English record breaking aviatrix who set many new records in aviation in the 1930s. During WW2, on 5 January 1941, her Airspeed Oxford plane, which she was flying for the Air Transport Auxiliary, went down in bad weather in the river Thames estuary east of London. The official line was that she ran out of fuel, but evidence has since emerged that she was shot down after twice failing to identify herself correctly. She bailed out and was seen in the water, but died in the freezing conditions before help could reach her. Her body was never found.

Note: A bit perplexing, this one. It is unlikely that she ran out of fuel as she'd only come from Prestwick, but equally unlikely that she was regarded as a stray Jerry, because a British naval officer on a nearby ship dived into the water to save her and died in the attempt. At that time, if it had been a stray Jerry, then instead of throwing him a lifebelt they'd probably have chucked him his wife and kids.

Miller, Glenn was an American musician from the "big band" era. On 15 December 1944 his UC64 Norseman aircraft, which was taking him from England to entertain troops in France, went down in bad weather over the English Channel en route from Clapham to Paris. Depths do not exceed 350 feet but the aircraft was small and the search area large.

Hitler, Adolf. German fuhrer from 1934 (Chancellor from 1933) until 1945, he allegedly committed suicide on 30 April that year in Berlin whereupon his body was partially cremated in the garden of the Reichschancellry. His remains were said to have fallen into the hands of the Soviets who, after performing medical (including dental) tests, buried and then exhumed them several times before secreting them under a paved courtyard in Magdeburg in 1946. Eventually (in 1970) they were again exhumed, before being cremated and thrown into a nearby river, with the exception of some pieces of lower jaw and a skull fragment which were removed to an archive facility in Moscow. In 1993 DNA tests were conducted on the skull fragment, which was then found to be from a woman, aged under 40, but who could not have been Eva Braun as she did not shoot herself and the fragment contained a bullet hole. The jaw fragments however were not DNA tested, although they had been purported (in the 1940s) to match Hitler's dental records very conclusively. Meanwhile however US intelligence has long held files to the effect that Hitler escaped by submarine (later identified as the U530) to Argentina and recently declassified FBI documents support this, as does a report sent to Washington at the time (1945) by the U.S. Naval Attache in Buenos Aires.


Himmler, Heinrich. Head of the nazi SS. Quickly committed suicide after being captured by the British in 1945. As the military situation in that area was uncertain, his body was hurriedly buried by a British major and 3 sergeants on Luneburg Heath. However when the major and 2 of the sergeants returned after the war (the 3rd sergeant had emigrated) they couldn't find the place. A nazi shrine had appeared beneath a certain tree in the same area, with a cross, flowers and wreaths, but this place when examined was found to be virgin unbroken ground. British case files were due to be released around 2020.

Note: Another good one for a handheld GPR or sonar unit, except that the moorland soil may be acidic and bones don't do too well in it.


Hubble, Edwin. The American astronomer and cosmologist credited with the discovery that the universe is expanding, that the Doppler redshift velocity of recession of galaxies is proportional to their distance from us, and that the intrinsic stellar luminosity of Cepheid variable stars can be combined with their pulsation periods to prove that many intragalactic gaseous nebulae are actually anagalactic phenomena -- he dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage in September 1953. His remains were cremated at Monrovia, California, but his wife, Grace, buried his ashes at a secret location which she never divulged.

Campbell, Donald (head missing) was attempting to break his own world water speed record on Coniston Water in the UK on 4 January 1967, when his Bluebird K-7 jet boat took off, did 9 tenths of a backward somersault, and crashed. Most of his skeleton was recovered from the lake in May 2001 (thereby disproving comedian Bernard Manning’s hypothesis that he came out of a tap in Huddersfield), but only then was it realised that the crash had in fact decapitated him, as his skull could not be found.

Ironically, if he’d been going a bit faster he might have survived, as the boat would have leapt higher, giving it the time to complete its backward somersault, and then belly-flopped onto the water, giving him at least a fighting chance.

Holt, Harold, the 17th Prime Minister of Australia, went swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria, on 17 December 1967, and was never seen again. He may have been a shark victim, but the sea in that area is also known for strong currents and Holt had recently sustained a shoulder injury. Body never found. Many ridiculous theories, naturally, including the posit that a Chinese sub surfaced, grabbed him and he ended up washing the pots in a restaurant in Beijing, down Ying Ting Tong Street round the back of the Forbidden City somewhere. This assumes, of course, that the UFO also seen in the area didn't abduct him after all.


Flynn, Sean was the only (yeah right) son of movie star, boozer and womaniser Errol Flynn. Sean became an actor, and then a war correspondent in the Vietnam War. He and fellow journalist Dana Stone (another male) disappeared in April 1970 while on an assignment in Cambodia and is thought to have been killed by the Khmer Rouge, although all that is known for certain is that they were originally captured by the Viet Cong near the village of Sangke Kaong. His mum searched for him for the better part of 10 years, but to no avail; he was declared legally dead in 1984.


Bingham, John (7th Earl of Lucan). Disappeared from his family's Belgravia, London home on 8 November 1974 after his children’s' nanny, one Sandra Rivett, was found bludgeoned to death in the cellar. His car was found at Newhaven, England, with a piece of lead pipe in the trunk and blood stains on the front seat. There have been numerous unsubstantiated sightings of him around the world, particularly in Welsh Argentina, Australia, Botswana and South Africa. Despite being a (rotten) gambler by profession, he has never touched the large monetary sum deposited for him in a South African bank which has led many to theorise that he is dead, although personally I think that all this proves is that despite being an inbred lord he is not completely stupid.

It is the belief of the Michael here, that he went out that night in his motor launch from Newhaven, armed with a bottle of spirits and the sleeping pills a friend had just given him, strapped himself in, punched a small hole in the bottom then drank and drugged himself into oblivion, although the more perceptive among us may have noticed him in the Spitting Image tv series from time to time, always in the background, driving the taxi, working the bar...

 

 

They say I’m good at finding things. If I could be faffed, which I can’t, I’d be looking for this guy
in the English Channel, 150 feet down off Newhaven, strapped into a small launch.
I've had connections with the aristocracy since I was a boy, and through the vine I've heard that  
Lucan's son thinks the same.

 

 

Regarding the murder itself, if you ask me I think it was Lord Lucan, in the cellar, with the lead pipe. But I don't really have a clue-tho. At any rate he'd be coming up for death through old age about now. One wonders if anything will be announced from anywhere.

Hoffa, James R.  President of the Teamsters (truck drivers') union in the USA, he disappeared in 1975 just before public hearings were due to take place into the dubious activities of certain mob members. Hoffa, a union man, had had to make an uneasy peace with the Mafia during his union-building years as they had invested heavily in the big businesses that he was having to disrupt in order to improve the pay and conditions for his union members. Having fought for and won an average pay level for union members of something like twice the national average, he duly disappeared along with others in 1975, although many believe that he was murdered by the man who had replaced him as Teamsters boss. Despite many searches, following various "leads", his body has never been found.

Chamberlain, Azaria was a little 9-week-old baby who went missing from a campsite near Ayers Rock in Queensland, Australia on 17 August 1980. Her parents, Michael and Lindy Chamberlain, reported that she had been snatched by a wild dingo, but they were disbelieved by the authorities and Lindy was charged with the baby's murder and convicted. Three years into her life sentence, however, she was released after pieces of the baby's clothing were found at a dingo's lair close to the campsite. But little Azaria herself was never found.

 

                                                                                                                                       --- Michael Alan Marshall (Researcher)

 

 

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