So many times I’ve heard the phrases, “Never give up” and “Justice needs to be served.”

The FBI, now having more than 30,000 employees (affectionately referred to as “G-men”), recently celebrated its 100^th anniversary as a national security agency. And looking look back over the years at some of the cold cases in their files, I noticed plenty of Unsolved Mysteries, like:

There is 79-year-old James Whitey Bulger, a Boston organized crime figure added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in 1999 and who faces charges for racketeering, murder, extortion, narcotics and money laundering…the “rat” or informant (said to be the inspiration for the Jack Nicholson role in the film “The Departed”), charged with 18 counts of murder and corrupting two FBI field agents.

“Whitey Bulger is a case that we take very personally here in the FBI for a lot of reasons. 99.999 percent of the FBI agents that are on board today, or have been on boat yesterday, have been 100 percent clean,” Burrus said. “Mr. Bulger found a couple of our weak spots.”

Bulger was tipped off about a secret federal indictment and remains a fugitive.

Jimmy Hoffa, an American labor leader and criminal convict, who served nearly a decade in prison. On July 30, 1975, Hoffa disappeared from a parking lot in Detroit and was never seen again. According to a convicted Mob hit man, Hoffa was shot in the house of Giacalone and his body was then buried in the foundations of the Giants stadium. Another mobster claimed that Hoffa was shot and put in the trunk of a car that was then put through a car compactor. But nobody knows the truth.

How about the three convicts, John Anglin, his brother Clarence, and Frank Morris, that escaped on June 11, 1962, from Alcatraz (“The Rock”) located on that lonely island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Paddle-like pieces of wood and bits of rubber inner tube were found in the water along with a homemade life-vest washed up on Cronkhite Beach. Had the men made it across the Bay, reached Angel Island, and then crossed Raccoon Straight into Marin County as planned? Or…? The FBI officially closed the case on December 31, 1979. I wonder what happened to those three men?

Dan Cooper, the hijacker (35 yrs ago) who did the incredible…jumped out of the back of a plane with a parachute and $200,000 ransom money (in twenty dollar bills) and disappeared into the night. By the five-year anniversary of the hijacking, the FBI had considered more than 800 suspects and eliminated all but two dozen from consideration. But Cooper’s fate remains a mystery to this day. Maybe he didn’t survive…in a wooded area in 1980 a young boy found a rotting package full of $20 bills ($5,800 in all) that matched the ransom money serial numbers. Thanks to a Seattle case agent named Larry Carr and new technologies like DNA testing, the FBI has reignited this case.

So, can I use those phrases about never giving up and justice being served with Cindy’s case? So many people have written to me saying Cindy’s file should be reopened and the potentially existing exhibits be reexamined with today’s sophisticated DNA technology. Let’s find out once and for all if she licked those envelopes that encased the threatening letters…if she sucked on those cigarette butts that were found at the scene of a few assaults…

What do YOU think? Do YOU wanna know? Tell me!

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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