The Generation Why Podcast Blog

A couple and their adopted daughter have been the subject of headlines after speculation about her age came into question. The couple have recently plead not guilty on two counts of neglect after leaving their adopted daughter behind in the U.S while relocating to another country. Michael and Kristine Barnett adopted Natalia Grace, whom they believed to be a six year old Ukrainian child with spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia, a rare type of dwarfism, in November of 2010 but claim they began to doubt their daughter was actually a minor from the first night she spent with them. (Source) Articles online detail how...

“I fell asleep but had a nightmare” read the last text message 21 year old Hannah Bender would ever send her mother. Hannah sent the ominous message on the night of September 15th 2019. “Are you home alone?”, her mother responded. She would never receive an answer. Several days passed and no one would hear from Hannah. She was officially reported missing on the 19th and her parents were not optimistic about finding her alive. They knew their daughter well enough to know that she would never voluntarily leave or completely cease contact with them. They felt a dull pain...

Mary Silvani didn’t have an easy life. Her father was homeless and her mother was never around. Mary heard her mother had been in and out of psychiatric institutions her whole life. She didn’t talk about her family to friends and classmates. Her parents died when she was sixteen and she was left homeless, along with her two siblings, Charles and Bob. When she was 24 years old she fell pregnant, but unable to keep her child, likely due to her circumstances, she gave it up for adoption. Mary later relocated to California with her brothers and what she did...

Residents of East Detroit have been the a grip of fear after multiple sexual assaults and murders went unsolved from the spring of 2018 – 2019. Over the span of a year the bodies of several women, all female and in their fifties, were found in abandoned houses around Detroit. The victims were found either nude or in a state of undress and had all been sexually assaulted. They had been positioned face down and each had a used condom left next to them. The slain women were discovered in shocking conditions, the crime scenes were bloody and it would later be...

Yet another decade’s old cold case has been solved this month with the help of genetic genealogy databases and this time it’s the long unsolved murder of 11 year old Terri Lynn Hollis. (Source) On Thanksgiving Day, November 23rd, 1972, 11 year old Terri Lynn Hollis and her 16 year old brother, Randy, were at their home in Torrance, California.  Terri was restless and went to play outside on her bike at around 3PM, never to return. The local police were alerted and Terri was officially reported as missing. Officers, who arrived at the girls home at around 9PM, searched...