Season 6 Episode 9: Hoping for a Spark

And you'll definitely want to listen to a recent episode of Killer Psyche where Candice looks into the mysterious murder of Ted Ammon, a wealthy Wall Street financier. Ted had been going through a divorce with his wife of thirteen years, Generosa, and child custody and millions in assets were at stake. Generosa and her new boyfriend, Danny Pelosi were the prime suspects, but Generosa died of cancer before police could prove her involvement. In twenty oh four, Danny was victed of second degree

murder but still maintains its innocence. How does hatred drive a person to murder the father of their children? Listen to Kill a Psyche on Apple podcasts Amazon Music, or you can listen to one week and free by joining Wandry Plus in the Wandry app. It began on June twelfth, nineteen sixty six, with a string of strange messages intercepted by the Brazilian Navy between three ham radio operators broadcasting from somewhere within the state of Hio Jijaneiro in the

southeast of Brazil. As the Navy listened in with interest, it was hard to understand exactly what the men were saying, not because it was difficult to hear, but rather because, without any context, the conversation was completely bizarre. It seemed the men were, with all seriousness, discussing plans for an

imminent attempt to access another dimension. The following day, fishermen off the coast of Atafona Beach in sound Chao de Barra, roughly three hundred kilometers northeast of Hio Jajaneiro, was startled by an intensely bright flash in the sky, followed moments later by the sound of a huge explosion that echoed far out over the waves. On land, the blast was so powerful it rattled the windows of buildings up to

fifteen kilometers away. Blowing many of them out completely. Those who witnessed the explosion described seeing an intensely loominous object appear in the sky from out of nowhere, then descend sharply into the sea, before flying back into the air

and exploding in a great ball of light. It was a month later, on Saturday, August twentieth in Nita Roy, a vibrant coastal city just across the bay from here Jijaneiro, when eighteen year old Georges Alvez da Costa was out flying his kite with friends on mohou Da Vintayne, a conical forest covered peak that rose sharply out of the city's eastern suburb. As the group made their way up the hill through the trees, George smelt a rancid, sickly

odor in the air. Curious to know where it was coming from, he followed it to a small clearing, where he made a gruesome discovery, the bodies of two fully clothed men lying side by side in the undergrowth on a bed of palm leaves, steadily decomposing as things wriggled and buzzed around their blackening faces. Back in nineteen sixty three, after two years of political turmoil triggered by the resignation

of their President of Brazil, Janio Quadros. A referendum had resulted in the effective election of Jiaogulat from the center left Brazilian Labor Party as the country's new president. Despite his popularity among the electorate, however, Goulart's ambitions to part nationalize some of the country's largest companies was considered too much of an existential threat by Brazil's right wing elites.

In response, in nineteen sixty four, the Brazilian armed forces, with the assistance of the United States government, overthrew Gulat's democratically elected government and established a military dictatorship in its place. Though the coup was relatively peaceful, the military's efforts to

suppress dissidents and maintain power was anything but. As such, there was good reason to assume that the bodies of two well dressed men found hidden in the undergrowth on the outskirts of Nita Roy could well turn out to be victims of this cruel new reality. Within minutes of surveying the apparent crime scene, however, it quickly became clear to police that something far more bizarre was going on.

You're listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard McLane Smith. Detective Solo Gomez stepped into the clearing and asked his officers to hold back the small crowd of onlookers that had been steadily gathering as news of the grim discovery spread through the neighborhood. Having first assumed a possible political motive, Gomez was surprised that no obvious cause of death could be found on the bodies. There were no bullet or

knife wounds, and no signs of beating or strangulation. It seemed almost as though the men, each wearing a smart suit under cheap plastic raincoats, had simply fallen asleep. He wondered, then, if perhaps the pair had poisoned themselves in some kind of suicide pact. This theory seemed as good as any, going by the empty glass bottle and sheet of laminated paper curled into a cone cup that was found next to them. But what then, of the bizarre metal objects

they found there too? Though there was no knowing what they were exactly, it seemed reasonable to assume they were some kind of eye mask, shaped like sunglasses without arms, and made entirely from lead. Then one of the officers handed a series of notes to the detective that were also found at the scene, and that was when things got really weird. The first contained a series of rudimentary equations which were identified as relating to Ohm's law and

the science of resistance and conductance. On the second was written the following Sunday, one tablet after the meal, Monday, one tablet in the morning on an empty stomach, Tuesday, one tablet after a meal, Wednesday, one tablet before bed. And on the third, even more cryptically, it said, at four thirty pm, be in the agreed place. At six thirty pm, swallow the capsule after the effect, protect the metals,

wait for signal mask. Going by the IDs found at the scene, the men were quickly identified as thirty four year old Miguel Jose Vienna and thirty two year old Manuel peraded a cruise from Campos Doskoy to Kazs, a city roughly two hundred and fifty kilometers northeast from where

they were found. To make things even more confusing, a bag containing approximately one hundred and fifty seven thousand cruzeros roughly equivalent to three hundred US dollars in today's money was also found at the scene, with another four thousand cruzeros found in one of the men's pockets. As it transpired. Both men were electronics experts who worked together in a TV and radio repair shop and had been friends for some time. Both sadly were also married with young children.

According to their wives, both had left Campos on the morning of Wednesday, August the seventeenth, claiming they were heading to Saumpaulou to collect some electronics equipment and possibly by a secondhand car. Miguel's wife verified that the pair had left with over two million crutezzeros between them for the trip just under five thousand US dollars into day's money,

which would appear to fit with their stated intentions. When asked about the strange masks, Manuel's wife, Donna, remembered seeing her husband trying it on for size a few days before he left, but had no idea what it was for. After finding bus tickets in the men's clothes, it appeared they boarded a bus together at Campos bus station at nine am on the Wednesday, before disembarking for some reason

in Nita Roy at two thirty pm. From there, they visited an electronic store called Flascop, located at number thirteen Traverse Salberto Veto, right in the city center. After being shown pictures of the men, the store's owner had no trouble recalling them, since he remembered vividly that they he come in to make a phone call, adding that both of them appeared calm and relaxed at the time. A torrential storm had then opened up over the city, which would explain why the men were then spotted in a

clothing store buying raincoats a short time later. By then, however, around three thirty PM, the men appeared to be in a serious hurry, not even waiting to put the coats on before dashing back out into the rain. It had just gone four thirty five PM when Miguel and Manuel, now wearing their raincoats, dashed into dash Helvas, a small bar on Avanida Marquez de Barana, not far from the

bottom of Moho de Vintayne. There, As the owner of the bar recounted to the police, Miguel ordered a bottle of magnesium infused water, constantly checking his watch as if urgently waiting for something. Manuel also looked anxious to leave as soon as possible. After buying the water, Miguel asked the owner for a receipt, saying he intended to bring the bottle back to collect the deposit for it. This revelation left Detective Gomez inclined to rule out suicide completely.

From the bar, the men were thought to have then made the journey into the hills on foot, staying up there until they died. All this new information was a good start at least, but ultimately left Detective Gomez with even more questions than he began with. For example, if the men had left with over two million cruzeros between them, how was it that, despite only buying a bottle of water and two raincoats, where they found with only roughly

one hundred and thirty thousand cruzos between them. A possible answer came when it was discovered that the bodies of the men had in fact been found two days before, on Thursday the eighteenth, by another teenager who was hunting for sparrows at the time. The boy claimed to have informed a local officer named Antonio Guerra, who had appeared had simply sat on the information. Gera was promptly put

under investigation and accused of stealing the missing money. It isn't known exactly how this played out, but reports suggest that this theory was eventually dismissed. And then there was the bed of palm leaves that the men had been found lying on. The thick pile of palms had been cut from the surrounding trees with a sharp implement, but no such tool was found at the scene, all of which gave detective Gomez good reason to believe that someone

else had been involved in the deaths. With Detective Gomez pinning his hopes on the autopsy revealing at least a cause of death, he was disappointed to discover that neither of the bodies could be kept in cold storage due to a combination of a backlog of cases in the district and broken refrigeration units. When the autopsy was eventually carried out, the bodies had deteriorated so much it was

impossible to gauge anything concrete. In the end, the coroner declared, to the best of his abilities that the men had suffered no burns or trauma, and perhaps most unexpectedly, had not been poisoned. Their deaths were recorded simply as the result of a cardiac arrest due to an unknown cause. Then, on August twenty sixth, as if things couldn't get any more bizarre, another incredible story came to light. It came from a sin A Kutino Desauza, who lived close to

the hill where the men were found. Dessauza, who was a well known personality in the local area, had not wanted to come forward for fear of ridicule, but was convinced to share her story after reading about the police's travails with the case. Her story began in the evening of August seventeenth, the same night the men were believed

to have died on Moha da Vintain. It was then that she was driving her three children home close to the foot of Maha da Vintaine when they were all drawn to the site of a strange oval object sitting low above the trees at the top of the hill. Desausa described it as being mostly orange with what looked like a band of fire around the edges, with numerous rays of light shooting out from its surface in all directions.

Transfixed by the sight of it, Desausa quickly pulled the are over, then watched the object with her children for a good few minutes. As it rose up and down a number of times above the trees before vanishing completely. One lesser known fact about Unexplained is that it actually started life as a website built through square Space, which I heard about from an advert on one of my

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purchase of a website or domain. The case took a further twist the day after Desaus's revelations when police arrested a man named Elsio Gomez, a friend of Miguel and Manuel's who'd been seen arguing with them shortly before they died. Although Gomez was able to provide a solid alibi for his whereabouts at the time, what he eventually revealed to the Nita Roy detectives made the hair stand up on

the back of their necks. The two men, according to Gomez, considered themselves scientific spiritualists who were also part of a secret society with unknown aims. Both, he said, had regularly attended seances and maintained a clandestine ham radio station in the city of Glisio, over which they frequently discussed their plans and ideas. And then there was the mysterious explosion

of June thirteenth, the month before the men died. As Gomez explained, back then, Manuel and Miguel had invited a number of friends down to Atapona Beach that day to watch the results of an experiment they'd been working on. Within minutes of arriving at the beach, the explosion occurred. Gomez was adamant that whatever Manuel and Miguel had been doing caused the explosion. The police then interviewed Miguel's niece, who appeared to corroborate some of Elsio Gomus's bizarre statement.

The niece bumped into Miguel and Manuel on the Wednesday they left Nita Roy When she asked them where they were going, the men replied to Sam Paulou to buy a car, just as they had told their wives, But when the niece pressed them on it, Miguel eventually conceded that this wasn't the whole reason for their trip. He then told her shortly before heading off that although he couldn't say what it was exactly, he hoped that by the time they returned they would know if Spiritism was

everything they had been led to believe it was. As the police soon discovered, both Manuel and Miguel, curiously, along with many other members of the local electronics industry, were followers of the religious and philosophical doctrine of Spiritism. The doctrine was established by French educator Ippolite Lyon Denizar Revill in eighteen fifty as a more scientifically minded offshoot of Spiritualism,

which had been established only a decade before. Where spiritualism advocates that we are surrounded by spirits of the dead with whom we can communicate as a matter of cause, Revill, who wrote under the nom de plume Alan Cardek, saw this much more as a fundamental principle of God's universe.

In short, according to Revill, our universe is in fact comprised of two worlds, one of spirit and one of matter, existing side by side, with the visible world of matter being where we live, and the world of spirit essentially another mention being where souls dwell. At some point in the late nineteenth century, revised teachings became hugely popular in Brazil, where communication with this spirit world is seen as a vital part of the process for being both physically and

spiritually healthy. For Manuel and Miguel and other followers of the religion, a typical Spiritism meeting would even involve preaching the religions doctrine directly to the spirits believed to exist

in the other realm. A few days after the bodies were found, police searching Miguel's home workshop discovered remnants of the lead piping from which they'd made their strange masks, but also a book titled Scientific Spiritism with a passage marked by Miguel regarding masks, intense luminosity, and accompanying spirits, all of which suggested the staggering possibility that the men had perhaps conceived of a way in which they might be able to access this other world and then attempted

to put it into practice out on the top of Moho Da Vintain. Not long after news of Senora Desauza's apparent sighting of a strange luminous object seen above Moho d, numerous others came forward claiming to have seen the exact same thing. Before long, people began offering explanations about what

exactly had taken place. Yoga teacher Kayo Miranda believed the men had accidentally overdosed on LSD or mescaline, which he said were commonly used by followers of spiritism in an effort to communicate with the spiritual plane through the use of high frequency thought waves. In a similar vein far the Oscar Gonzalez Covedo, a prominent Brazilian scholar of occultism and parapsychology, suggested the men had in fact died after attempting to access the light source from another world in

the hope that it would stimulate their third eyes. This feat, according to him, could be achieved through a combination of fasting and psychotropic drug use, both of which were hinted at in one of the notes found with the bodies

of the deceased. Another slightly more grounded theory was that the men were working to build an atomic bomb, or were involved in a smuggling ring to help gather components for such a weapon, the idea being that the men had perhaps taken something to counteract the effects of radiation poisoning, but had then poisoned themselves in the process. Either way, for detective Gomez, it seemed increasingly likely that someone else had been involved in the men's death who was still

at large. This theory was given even more weight when it was found that although the handwriting in those strange notes was Miguel's, the style was not clearly According to police, the men had been given the instructions by somebody else. This led detective Gomez to also consider the possibility that the two men had been fooled into participating in something by one of their spiritism associates, who then later robbed

them when things had gone wrong. With no new developments for the best part of a year, it was sometime in August nineteen sixty seven that another witness came forward. Security guard Raulino Jomatos was working a spot near to the bottom of Mocha da Vintenne back on the night of Wednesday, August seventeenth in nineteen sixty six, when he apparently or two men matching Manuel and Miguel's description arrive

at the spot in a jeep. He claimed also to see a blondhaired man in the driver's seat and of further two passengers in the back along with the deceased. The security guard claimed to have then seen Manuel and Miguel leave the vehicle before heading up into the trees and disappearing from sight shortly after. In light of this new information, the bodies were dug up on August twenty fifth and given a second autopsy by order of the

local prosecutor. Sadly, however, no further information was ascertained. The following year. However, in June nineteen sixty eight, a radiochemical analysis was finally carried out on samples of the deceased's hair, which determined at least that the deaths had not been caused by the ingestion of either of the foremost common poisons used to kill arsnick mercury, barium or thallium, throwing

the suicide theory even further into doubt. Then, in February nineteen sixty nine, police received word from infamous Underworld figure Hamilton Benzani, who was serving over fifty years in a Saint Paulou prison at the time, that he had something to confess. A representative was duly sent from the police

to hear what he had to say. As his story went, Benzani was lying low in here Jijaneiro when he was approached by three men who introduced themselves only with the nicknames Espanol, Wilson, Alamo and Acascio, and offered him a large sum of money to help them do a job, as he put it in Nito roy. After agreeing to the offer, Benzani said he escorted the men to the city, where they got in a taxi before later change into a private car, with which he drove them all to

a nearby spiritualist center. Inside the center, Benzani was introduced to Miguel and Manuel, who he was told later were the intended targets of the job. After participating in assiance together, Benzani then claimed that he, along with Espanol Wilson Alamo and a Cassio and the owner of the spiritism center, drove with Miguel and Manuel to the bottom of Moro

de Vintaine. Once there, Benzani was ordered to stay in the car while the others forced Miguel and Manuel out at gunpoint before ushering them up the hill half an hour later. According to Benzani, the group then returned without Manuel and Miguel carrying a bundle of money they'd stolen

from the two men Hamilton. Benzani's story was neat enough and for someone unlikely to have heard much about the finer details at the case, not least of all the security guards claimed that he'd seen the two men arrive at the bottom of the hill in a jeep accompanied by a number of other people. It had some credibility to many others. However, it was all a little too neat.

Either the police had simply made up the story from scratch in an effort to finally close the case, or Benzani, who was serving fifty years in prison at the time, had spun them a tale in an effort to reduce its sentence. With little else to go on. However, the

case was eventually closed in May nineteen sixty nine. All in all, it is certainly one of the more bizarre and extraordinary unexplained deaths of recent times, with explanations ranging from the mundane to the truly out there, and at the center of it all the enigma of those strange,

indecipherable lead masks. Not long after the case was closed, something else came to light that had somehow been missed all those years before, another unexplained death, this time involving a man named Ermes Luise Phaytosa, who was also a radio and TV technician and had been found dead in a similar area of Nita Roy on a hill called

Maho Do Crozero. It was said that Phayetosa had gone out at the hills to utilize psychic skills that he hoped would enable him to pick up radio and television signals with just the power of his mind, and found by his side when his body was finally discovered was a single thick lead mask. After next week's ex episode, Unexplained will be taking a short midseason break. We'll return with episode ten on Friday, March fifth. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can

now do so via Patreon. To receive access to add free episodes, just go to Patron dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Pod to sign up. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced

by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com, or Twitter at Unexplained part and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained podcast