Not Today Not Today

In 1997, 39 members of a religious sect were found dead by suicide inside a San Diego mansion. Leaders Marshall “Herf” Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles promised that an extraterrestrial spacecraft would take them all to the heaven, or as they called it, “The Next Level”.

While climbing the Piz Badile Mountain in the Swiss Alps in 2003, Jeremy Colenso and Rachel Kelsey were caught in a terrifying electrical storm. They did their best to climb down however after hours, the climb became too dangerous and the couple was stranded on a ledge 3,000 meters up.

Japan AirLines Flight 123 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Tokyo to Osaka, Japan.  On August 12, 1985, the Boeing 747 suffered a severe structural failure and decompression 12 minutes into the flight causing the pilots to lose all control. The crash of Flight 123 is the deadliest single-aircraft accident in aviation history.

From 1971 to 1983, serial killer Robert Hansen murdered at least 17 women in Anchorage, AK. Hansen kidnapped and assaulted women before flying them to remote areas in the Alaskan wilderness in his private plane where he hunted them down with a rifle. Hansen’s terrifying murder spree would have continued, had it not been for Cindy Paulson.

 

To read The Institution by Helen Fields head to: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-institution-helen-fields?variant=41088092733474

In this episode we'll be discussing some of the worst theme park accidents of all time.

Three minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928 the St. Francis Dam collapsed, sending over 12 billion gallons of water and debris rushing down the Santa Clara River Valley from San Francisquito Canyon to the Pacific Ocean, 54 miles away. In five and a half hours more than 400 peoples lives were claimed as they were swept away in the dark and murky waters. It is considered to have been one of the worst American civil engineering disasters of the 20th century and the third-greatest loss of life in California history.