Mysterious deaths, vanishings, and spooky surveillance footage

Brent Swancer
Mysterious Universe
Wed, 04 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC

We are approaching an era in which security cameras are becoming more and more numerous and pervading our lives, in which often much of what we do is captured on video to some extent, even without our knowledge. In some places, such as the United Kingdom, such surveillance cameras are omnipresent and inescapable, and practically every move anyone makes is recorded constantly, with no real escape from the ever watching eye of this network.

With this dwindling privacy and the sheer number of cameras quietly and dutifully watching practically our every move, it is perhaps no surprise that they sometimes provide curious insights and clues into mysterious deaths and disappearances, capturing victims of crimes, perpetrators, and those who have vanished into thin air. However, the existence of this potential evidence does not always lead to solving these mysteries, and in many cases can even weave more puzzles around these cases. I have covered this topic here at Mysterious Universe before, but there are many such cases, and the rabbit hole goes deep. Here are some more.

Jane Rimmer

Security footage has become a useful tool for trying to solve baffling murders, and one rather well-publicized mysterious murder with surveillance footage is the case of 23-year-old Jane Rimmer, who on the evening of June 8, 1996, was out for a night on the town partying with a group of friends, visiting the Club Bayview and a friend's house before eventually winding up at the Continental Hotel in the Claremont area of Perth Australia. Shortly after midnight, Jane reportedly told her friends she was going to head home, and her friends went off in a taxi to continue their partying. It would be the last time they would see her alive. After an extensive manhunt for the missing woman, on August 3 Rimmer's dead body was found unceremoniously dumped in a patch of remote bushland on the outskirts of Perth.

This grim discovery would prove to be alarming for authorities because it was the same area where two other women had gone missing in the same timeframe, with one of them, a Ciara Glennon, turning up dead not far from where Rimmer's body had been discovered. The other woman, Sarah Spiers, was never found but is thought to have been killed and connected to the Glennon murder, as both women had been abducted while leaving Club Bayview, where Rimmer had also curiously been on the night of her disappearance. Police began to suspect that a serial killer was at large in the area, and that all three women had fallen victim to the same unknown assailant, who has never been caught.

This rather dark theory gained some momentum and a mysterious clue when authorities pored over CCTV footage from the night of the Rimmer disappearance and saw something very suspicious indeed. The footage shows Rimmer outside of the Continental Hotel just after midnight on June 9, and apparently right after her and her friends parted ways for the evening. As she stands there she is approached by a man who appears to casually speak with her, although it is unclear if she knew him or not. The rotating camera then pans around to another area, but when it returns to where Rimmer had just been standing a minute before both her and the unknown man are gone. Poring over all of the footage of that evening turned up no sign of them leaving and it is unknown if they left together or not. Although there is no hard evidence to link the man seen in the footage with Rimmer's disappearance and death, police believe that he is certainly a person of interest that could at least provide further clues, and could even be the killer himself. Unfortunately, the mysterious individual has never been identified despite widespread circulation of the footage, and until someone identifies him both he and the Claremont killer will remain specters, Rimmer's death unanswered.