10 Disturbing Crimes Solved By Amateurs

In April 2001, retired trucker Ronald Tefler spied a five-gallon bucket of cement in the northeast of Kansas City. With his interest strangely piqued, he whacked it repeatedly against the pavement until a rank odour travelled up his hairy nostrils.

Having seen something that resembled skin and meat, Tefler took the bucket of ‘animal remains’ home for his pigs to feast on. A few months later construction worker Franklin Ray Dean spotted and immediately alerted the authorities to a cylinder of concreate that had hair and the top of a human skull poking out.

After forensic sculptor Frank Bender slapped clay onto the skull and recreated the face of the scalp’s former owner, Lieutenant Tom O’Leary uploaded photos of the bust onto the Doe Network. Online sleuth Ellen Reach discovered the images, and initially thought that the reconstructed head belonged to once famous Labor leader Jimmy Hoffa.

But, after doing more digging online, Reach put that crazy theory aside when she recognised the uncanny resemblance to Greg May. In March 2005, four months after she suggested the head was May’s, dental records proved she was right and Tom O’Leary could finally convict the father’s long suspected killers.

Although they disagreed in court about who stabbed their ‘friend’ May in the back, ex-convicts Julie Miller and Douglas DeBruin both confessed to hoisting the tattoo artist onto a washing machine, slicing his head off with a chainsaw, and neatly tucking the rest of his limbs into black bin bags.