Asked if she has ever heard anything similar to Endres’ statements—especially about the fact that he asked the funeral home to assemble his late wife’s bones—in her 30-plus years working on unsolved cases, Meurer said she had.
“Earlier this year I was speaking to someone—it wasn’t related to an Unsolved Mysteries case—but this woman’s daughter had died and her bones had been found in a forest. And she did the exact same thing that Rob did. She said, ‘When I get the bones back from the police, I just want to assemble them and be with her.’ It reminded me of Rob. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe this isn’t so unusual.’ Maybe there are a lot people in the world who feel this way because they never got to say goodbye to their loved one. And the bones are all that’s left—the bones are something tangible.”
Does Meurer form opinions about what happened in the Unsolved Mysteries cases she chronicles?
“When it comes to people that we interview, I am an innocent until proven guilty person,” said Meurer. “People pour their hearts out to us and are very honest with us about their feelings. We always want to respect people’s feelings.”
“If we ever had a case where we’re really sure what happened, that’s not an unsolved mystery in our mind,” continued Meurer. “We produce cases that continue to baffle us, like Rey Rivera. I do not know what happened to Rey. I’m still totally baffled. And Patrice as well…. Usually, when these stories premiere, I still have an open mind. Having done the series for so many years, you just never know where that solve is going to come from. If you go down one road, you’re dismissing other possibilities, so we try and stay open to all possibilities.”
How will the series update viewers on developments to the cases?
Meurer said Unsolved Mysteries will “definitely” update audiences on any major breaks in the cases covered. “We used to have updates in the original episodes if a story got solved. Sometimes they got solved the night we aired. We would get an update, [and] John [Cosgrove] would send a crew out as quickly as we could. Or else we would get local news footage and produce an update—just to let the audience know what happened in that case.”
Meurer said she feels like she owes Unsolved Mysteries audience members these updates “because they’re rooting for these people to have their mystery solved.” Considering the social media age we live in, Meurer said, “I think we would probably push any solid information out through social media so that we could get it to the world as quickly as possible.” In terms of producing a Netflix update, she and the series creatives are still figuring out what that might look like. “I guess it would be an extra or something that would stream along with the episode. That hasn’t been drilled down on how exactly that would happen, but we would get the word out.”
Given the leads she has already received, which case does Meurer think could be solved first?
“We’ve probably gotten around 2,000 emails that would be considered either tips or comments,” said Meurer, noting that that number does not include leads that were sent directly to the FBI. “Probably the most specific leads we’ve had come in have been about the Alonzo Brooks case [that was featured in episode four], because there were people in the town who heard things. That’s hearsay, so there’s not much we can do with that, but some new names have come in. With Xavier [Dupont de Ligonnès, featured in episode three], somebody sent us a photo of someone who looked so much like him. They’d snapped a photo of him, not knowing, in Chicago. And in the photo, it seems like Xavier had a little bit of face work done. It looked very much like him, but we don’t have a name for that person. This was just a stranger that this person saw.”
Meurer said the tips continue to roll in. “Every day, we kind of do a tip debrief at the end of the day. And we get so excited about what’s coming in, and feel hopeful that these cases can be solved—that’s the dream.”
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