Darren Benavides

Crazy 😳

15 year-old Kayla Berg, went missing from Antigo, in August of 2009. August 11, 2009 at 9:30 p.m.: 24 year-old Kevin Kielcheski, a family friend, takes Kayla to a McDonalds, where she makes plans with a friend to talk later that night. Around 8:45 that evening, Within hours, she requested to be dropped off at a house out in Wausau, and from there she disappeared August 12, 2009: Kayla’s father calls Hope Berg, Kayla’s mother, to let her know Kayla hadn’t come home. Hope begins contacting Kayla’s friends, including Kevin Kielcheski, but nobody seems to know where Kayla is. Kevin claims he dropped Kayla off at her boyfriend’s house in Wausau (about 35 miles from Antigo). August 13-18, 2009: after about 5 to 6 days, when questioning Kayla’s friends still hadn’t located her, Kayla’s mother finally calls police to report her missing. Police list her as an endangered runaway and also question Kevin, and Kayla’s 19 year-old, secret boyfriend, Miguel. October 2009: Kevin is charged with 2nd Degree Reckless Endangerment. Police search where he was living in Deerbrook at his parents’ home, and his vehicle is taken in. Police also search two areas in Lincoln County where Miguel’s phone had pinged the night Kayla disappeared. May 2011: Cadaver dogs search Kevin’s parents’ property, as well as the potato farm. Kayla is not found. June 15, 2011: Kayla’s father, James, passes away after a hard-fought battle with cancer. July 22, 2011: Charges are dropped against Kevin, due to lack of evidence. October 2016: A video is discovered on YouTube, posted back in 2011, now known as the “Hi Walter” video. This video features a man who appears to have a girl chained and held captive; the girl was said to resemble Kayla, and soon goes viral. This video is later found to be a fake, but not before it traumatizes Hope, Kayla’s mother. October 2019: A search is done in the Nicolet National Forest in eastern Langlade County. Kayla is not found. December 2023: An inmate in the Wisconsin State Prison System gives police a tip leading them to search in Kewaunee County, about 100 miles east of Antigo. Kayla is not found. To this day, Kayla has never been found, and no one has faced any consequences for her disappearance. Unfortunately, her father passed away never knowing what happened to his daughter. Her mother, Hope, is still looking for answers.

Crazy 😳

On April 1, 2014, Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon left their host family’s home to take the family’s dog on a walk through the scenic forests around the Baru volcano in Boquete, Panama. Kremers and Froon were students from Amersfoort in the Netherlands. They had spent six months planning their trip to Panama, which was supposed to serve as part vacation, part service trip. They planned on spending some time hiking and touring while also volunteering with local children, teaching arts and crafts, and learning Spanish. The two women had been hiking around the Panamanian jungle for the past two weeks as part of a backpacking mission trip and intended to stay for the next four weeks with their host family to volunteer at a local school. However, after they waved goodbye to their family at 11:00 AM on April 1st, they were never seen again. The women had written a Facebook post, in which they discussed their intentions to tour the local village. They also wrote that they had had brunch with two fellow Dutchmen before embarking on their hike On the night of April 1, the host family noticed something was wrong. Their dog had returned, safe and sound, but alone — the girls were nowhere to be found. The host family searched the area around their home but decided to wait until morning to alert the authorities. On April 2, Kremers and Froon missed an appointment with a local tour guide who was supposed to take them on a private walking tour of Boquete, which prompted the host family to alert authorities. The next morning an aerial search of the forest was conducted as well as a search of the village and the lightly wooded areas by locals. By April 6, the two women were still missing. Fearing the worst, the families of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon flew to Panama, bringing with them detectives from the Netherlands. Along with local police and dog units, they searched the forests for ten days. Days turned into weeks, and after ten weeks there were still no signs of either Kremers or Froon. Then, as police were slowing their search efforts, a local woman turned in a blue backpack, claiming to have found it in a rice paddy along the banks of the river. Inside the backpack were two pairs of sunglasses, $83 in cash, Lisanne Froon’s passport, a water bottle, and two bras. Also inside, most importantly, was Froon’s camera and both of the women’s cell phones. The phones had remained in service for almost ten days after the women disappeared. Over just four days, 77 separate attempts had been made to call the police, both via 112, the emergency number in the Netherlands, and 911, the emergency number in Panama. Using the call logs, police were able to come up with an outline of the time the girls spent missing in the forests. The first two emergency calls had been just hours after Kremers and Froon had begun their hike to the 112 emergency number. Due to the dense jungle, neither attempts went through. In fact, out of all 77 calls, only one managed to make contact but broke up after just two seconds. Their was photos in the camera that were taken on the night of April 1 the photos shows the girls belongings spread out on rocks plastics bags and candy rappers, the back of Kris kremers head was shown with blood leaking from her temple after investigating the area nearby police found kremers clothing folded neatly along the edge of a river two months later a pelvic bone and a foot still inside a boot were found soon after that both woman’s bones were found lisannes froons bone had bits of flesh still attached Kris kremers bones were stark white like if bleached Police questioned several people tour guides and hikers but their wasn’t enough evidence to determine the cause of death To this day, the disappearance and deaths of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon remain a harrowing mystery.

on Christmas Eve 1945, in Fayetteville, West Virginia. George and Jennie Sodder went to sleep as nine of their ten children settled in for the evening. Their tenth child was away from home, serving in the military. At around 1 a.m., shortly after the calendar flipped over to Christmas Day, a fire broke out in the Sodder home. George Sodder and his wife escaped the inferno with four of their children, but the other five seemed to vanish from the scene of the blaze. George Sodder reportedly broke a window during the fire, re-entered the house, and quickly made his way through the smoke and flames that enveloped the downstairs. He reportedly figured his five children who didn’t make it out were trapped upstairs. No fire trucks arrived at the house until 8 a.m., seven hours after the blaze. The Sodder house burned to the ground, and the five missing Sodder children were never seen or heard from again. Maurice, 14; Martha 12; Louis, 9; Jennie, 8; and Betty, 5, disappeared without a trace. George and Jennie Sodder reportedly refused to believe their five missing children were dead, especially after a search of the grounds revealed no human remains. the chief of the fire department said the blaze was so hot that it would have destroyed the bodies. A state police inspector blamed the deadly fire on bad wiring But the Sodders became suspicious when they pieced together strange events leading up to the deadly fire. A man looking for work at the Sodder house a few months before the incident had told George Sodder that the fuse boxes in the back of the house were “going to cause a fire someday.” But the power company had recently checked the wiring and said it was working properly. At about the same time, an insurance salesman allegedly became angry with George when he turned down a life insurance policy. The man warned, “Your goddamn house is going up in smoke, and your children are going to be destroyed. You are going to be paid for the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini.” George was born in Italy and was allegedly outspoken about his dislike for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, sometimes reportedly getting into intense arguments with other Italians in their hometown of Fayetteville. Jennie remembered hearing a loud thud on the roof about an hour before she noticed smoke coming into her bedroom, questioning the suggestion that bad wiring caused the fire In the years after the fire, people reported tips about the missing Sodder children around the country. One alleged that daughter Martha was living in a convent in St. Louis. Another claimed the children were living with a relative of Jennie. In 1968, 23 years after the fire, Jennie received a letter with no return address and a Kentucky postmark. The letter contained a photo of a man in his 20s and, written on the backside, the words: "Louis Sodder," "I love brother Frankie," "ilil Boys," and "A90132" or "A90135." The Sodders reportedly hired a private detective to track to the lead, but to no avail. The five missing Sodder children were never seen again

On the evening of June 23, 1965, Houston Police Captain Charles Bullock and his partner, L.M. Barta, were dispatched to the home of Fred and Edwina Rogers for a welfare check. Edwina’s nephew, Marvin Martin, hadn’t heard from his aunt for a worrying amount of time. Their knock was met with silence. So, the two police officers wound around the back of the house. They found a makeshift barricade of flower pots obstructing the back door, which made Bullock suspicious. When he and Barta pushed inside and entered the kitchen, his suspicions shifted into adrenaline. He later remembered that something “just didn’t feel right” inside the Rogers’ home. “I don’t know why I looked in the refrigerator,” he said. “For some reason I just opened it.” At first, Bullock and Barta thought what they were seeing was hog meat. Then they looked down. There, in the vegetable drawer, were two decapitated human heads. Edwina had been shot in the head; Fred had been bludgeoned with a hammer. But their killer had gone above and beyond simply killing the Rogers — he’d also dismembered the couple, removed Fred’s genitals, and flushed Fred’s intestines down the toilet. Quickly, the investigation into the Ice Box Murders pivoted to a single suspect — the couple’s 42-year-old son Charles. Charles Rogers lived with his parents. There was blood on the keyhole of his door. And he was nowhere to be found. Charles Rogers, the prime suspect in the Ice Box Murders, was no ordinary man. He had served in World War II, graduated with a degree in nuclear physics, and spent nearly a decade working for Shell Oil as a seismologist. He would leave home before dawn, and return after dark — but no one was sure if he actually had a job. He rarely even saw his parents in person and communicated with them by slipping notes under the door. As authorities pieced together the Rogers’ family life, they found that Charles might have had a motive to kill Fred and Edwina. Hugh and Martha Gardenier, Rogers had endured their manipulative behavior for years. They had taken out loans in his name, robbed him of his savings, and made his life a living hell. A nationwide search to find him, however, yielded nothing. Authorities even checked the local airfields, as Rogers learned how to fly while serving in the Navy. He was officially declared dead in 1975. But the mystery didn’t die with him. Indeed, some suspect that Charles Rogers did much more than kill his parents — and that he might have been involved in the plot to kill John F. Kennedy. Rogers was one of the so-called tramps spotted in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22, 1963. Charles Rogers had recorded his involvement in Kennedy’s death in his diaries. When his parents uncovered the diaries, he killed them. This allegation about Charles Rogers’ past remains unproven. But the Gardeniers claim to know where he ended up. They say that they traced Rogers’ movements to Mexico, where he purportedly landed a mining job through his oil industry connections. Allegedly, he himself was murdered — with a pickaxe — by miners in Honduras. In the end, if Rogers did manage to kill his parents and disappear, his theoretical work for the CIA isn’t as outlandish as it seems. After all, he left not a single trace, completed his mission — and vanished like a ghost.