Free Republic

Greg Howells' wife told SFGATE she believes the playwright staged his own death On a summer evening in 1997, a theater director headed out to hit a twilight round of golf in Carmel Valley, the wealthy oceanside town on California’s Central Coast. There was a gentle breeze rustling the oak trees and tall grass that evening, the sea air a mild 60 degrees. Greg Howells played 12 holes and was never seen again. His cart was found on the 13th tee, with no balls remaining in his bag and some clubs thrown down on the grass. A script of...

The jigsaw puzzle of William Howard Hughes Jr.'s life has many missing pieces. After disappearing into thin air in 1983 he was wanted across the globe by numerous agencies, from the Air Force to the FBI to Interpol. At one point it was thought that he defected to the Russians. Some suggested he sabotaged the disastrous Challenger space shuttle launch. Even after his recent capture, much of this unlikely story remains a mystery for the ages. Here’s what we found out. Born in Seattle in 1950 to a father who worked in the airline industry, Hughes had three sisters. He...

The Jane Doe, known only as "Blue Pacheco" by authorities, has now been identified as Patricia Skiple of Colton, Oregon. On June 3, 1993, Skiple's body was found on the side of California state Route 152 in unincorporated Gilroy. She was 45 years old at the time of her death. In 2019, the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office partnered with the DNA Doe Project to attempt to identify the body via investigative genetic genealogy. “This case was exceptionally challenging due to recent Norwegian ancestry which resulted in very distant DNA matches on GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA,” said DNA Doe Project team...

San Francisco is an enigma. One of the most walkable cities in America yet filled with streets so steep your legs burn; a hub of zero-emission vehicles and electric bikes crisscrossed with the world's last manually operated cable car system; a leftist haven with more free-market billionaires per capita than any other city on Earth. This complexity may lead to some nuanced questions about the city, but also sometimes people open their phones and ask: “Is San Francisco a country?” I found the weirdest questions people have been asking Google about the city, seemingly largely informed by a misunderstanding of...

It started with a petrified tree, half-buried in the mud of the Mokelumne River watershed in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The site intrigued Greg Francek, a ranger for East Bay Municipal Utility District, as he was walking the valley last summer. He inspected further, and what he recently discovered led to one of the most significant fossil discoveries in California history. Advertisement "I looked around the area further and I found a second tree," Francek said in an EBMUD statement released this week, documenting the discovery. "And then a third and so on. After finding dozens of trees I realized...