As a weird kid growing up in the ’80s, Unsolved Mysteries gave me completely unrealistic expectations about the frequency of amnesia and spontaneous human combustion. Every book on strange and unusual deaths featured the same haunting images. Burned bodies with only a single leg remaining. Two names appeared the most: Dr. John Irving Bentley and Helen Conway. Before their deaths, a woman named Mary Hardy Reeser met a similar fate. She died in July 1951, leaving behind a mystery that captured national attention. Unlike Bentley and Conway, newspapers covered her case in remarkable detail.