The Generation Why Podcast Blog

In the summer of 1973, two teenage friends took a road trip from Pittsburgh to Virginia for a week long vacation in the quiet coastal city of Virginia Beach.  (Source) Best friends Lynn Seethaler, an editorial assistant and Janice Pietropola, a secretary, both 19 years of age, rented a cottage motel together on 10th street and Atlantic Avenue near the Oceanfront. They spent their days on the beach, swimming and sun bathing and their evenings relaxing with a few beers, often in the company of new friends they had met while vacationing.  On the final day of their trip the...

Timmothy Pitzen went missing from Aurora, Illinois in 2011 when he was just six years old. On the morning of May 11th his father dropped him off at Kindergarten at Greenman Elementary. Around half an hour later Timmothy’s mother,  Amy Joan Marie Fry-Pitzen, showed up to the school to take him out, due to what she told officials was a “family emergency”. (Source) A trail of witnesses and CCTV footage showed that the mother and son spent the following two days together taking day trips to a zoo and a water park. Amy made a call to her family on the...

This post contains details of child abuse and sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised. In 2007 a little girl named Grace and her younger brother were homed with an adoption supervisor named Sara Packer, who worked at the Northampton County adoptions in Pennsylvania. Grace was a happy little girl and was excited at the prospect that she and her brother were going to move into new home and have loving parents to take care of them. No one could have imagined the horror that awaited her.   (Source) Although the Packers doted on her younger brother, they had a completely...

On March 1st, 2019, 11 year old Amberly Alexis Barnett went missing from her Aunt’s mobile home in Alabama. (Source) Amberly, lived in Polk County, Georgia with her mother, Jonie Barnett, but had been living with her Aunt at her trailer in Collinsville, Alabama near Mount Vernon, when she disappeared. On the evening of March 1st, her Aunt took a quick trip to a local Walmart with her boyfriend and left Amberly home alone. Amberly had asked for Chinese takeaway for dinner and had decided to stay home and eat while her guardians went out to the store. When they returned at...

In 2006, in Nash County, North Carolina, 42 year old Elizabeth Bess Edwards Keel died accidentally after slipping on ice and hitting her head on a small set of concrete steps outside of her own home. A medical examiner signed the death off as accidental, stating “blunt force trauma to the head” as the cause. (Source) Known simply as “Bess” by her friends and co-workers at “Microbac Laboratories” in Wilson, she was described as a sweet woman who loved horse riding and the outdoors. Those who knew her were understandably shocked at her sudden death and were suspicious of the circumstances...