A subreddit dedicated to the unresolved mysteries of the world. Submissions should outline a mystery and provide a link to a more detailed review of the case such as a Wiki article or news report. Replies analysing and speculating over the mystery and possible explanations are encouraged. -
Hey everyone, i know this topic has kind of been exhausted, but i just finished there’s something wrong with aunt diane, and let me say, it was devastating and incredibly hard to watch. also, the photos of her body were not necessary, especially for that long, and were really upsetting and kind of disrespectful to the dead (?) she did kill 7 people, so idk.
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just to get this out of the way—diane was clearly a closet alcoholic. was it to deal with her husband? the stresses of basically raising 3 kids? her routine getting thrown off? honestly i’m not sure, however, i do have a personal theory.
1A. Personally, i know a lot of people say that diane’s behavior was uncharacteristic for an alcoholic, but isn’t that EXACTLY what you would expect from an alcoholic who was thrown off their normal routine?? she and her husband worked opposite schedules, so it was probably a lot easier to hide her drinking. that weekend? not so much. idk if it was a hair of the dog thing, or if she was playing catch up, but i think we can all agree she was drinking to ease something. -
the timeline is what really does throw me off. a 35 minute drive that took 4 hours?? there’s lots of holes between phone calls and where she was spotted. in my opinion, her smoking or taking an edible was likely at the mcdonald’s, hiding it in the OJ, for whatever reason. she also may have thrown up an edible on the side of the road, which could explain no stomach contents. i can speak from personal experience that edibles hit different than smoking, they would have found some sort of paraphernalia in the car, so she likely had it hit her like a fucking brick right before she went on the highly for that 2 mile stretch. all the other time holes, i’m not sure. maybe she tried to sober up, maybe went somewhere else, did she buy an edible? i have no idea.
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whatever was said on that last phone call is key whether it was an accident or murder suicide. i don’t want to assume, and the brother she talked to last lost all three children, so im not going to say what was said or i think was said. it probably pissed her off to the extent that she drove so determined. maybe she had tunnel vision down the highway: “i need to get home so no one finds out. i will stay in the slow lane and go until i see this exit” and then boom doesn’t register a car. i also see a scenario where she throws the phone on the rail, jumps in the front seat, chugs the equivalent of 10 shots and then crashes. 10 un digested shots is significant. and the bottle being found in the passenger seat. she wasn’t hiding it well, or she was just pounding away as she drove.
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her husbands a real piece of shit. i think she acted like a man-child and resented his wife more for leaving him the pieces to pick up rather than killing his child and nieces. i also think he knows more than he is saying. did he know diane drank? idk. but i do think he knew she wasn’t well to drive, and left her anyway so he didn’t have to deal with the kids.
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does any one have sources on what people in her work circle said? i can’t find much, but i have a feeling they would be more in tune of her life because they are not in her close social net, so she can let her guard down.
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i feel so much for those children. i also think they were not wearing car seats correct? diane fell out of the car, and the kids were in a pile? that could either be her negligence or purposeful. i’m not sure. whatever it was, i hope those children died quickly and didn’t know it was coming. i hope they rest in peace.
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the accident photos broke my heart. seeing the man hanging out of the car. i can’t even imagine what they must have experienced. i wish well for bryan. he would be my age today, and i was always wonder if he went to college, or if we’ve ever crossed paths.
please pick this apart. i missed so many details, but im a little bit high right now and dumping my thoughts.
i dont hate diane. i think she had an illness and was in such a perfectionist mindset that asking for help was unfathomable. i understand. i had to black out and almost die before i got help for my ED. hiding it isn’t as hard as you guys thinks. i hope they all rest in peace, and i sincerely hope that diane did not mean the harm she caused. ❤️
wiki link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Taconic_State_Parkway_crash
another of her: https://allthatsinteresting.com/diane-schuler
here is, in my opinion, one of the best write-ups included.
I've said this on other posts but the mystery to me isn't whether or not she was drunk or whether she was a closet alcoholic. The mystery is whether she wrecked the car on purpose or not.
Absolutely.
Its also something that will forever elude us. There's simply no way of ever knowing the answer.
I am actually surprised that the contents of that phone call have not been leaked to any great degree. I assume law enforcement knows the details but have kept it tight lipped
I don’t think the brother ever divulged the contents of that conversation. My guess is that his wife, the mother of the three girls who died, knows at least some of the conversation with Diane. I do think the wife blamed her husband to an extent (how could you not?), because it was his sister driving their car with their kids, and he may have known she had a drinking problem. They separated after a while, didn’t they? We will never know for certain, will we, what was in that phone call.
Link
The sister-in-law spoke to Diana directly.
The couple has stayed together and had another baby in 2013.
Really? I would have thought that a crash investigation would yield some answers. That coupled with traffic CCTV, eye witness accounts and data from the vehicle. I have noticed a trend towards disguising suicides on the road as accidents, definitely happens where I live, straight stretches of roads and they crash at speed into stobie poles and trees.
There's no way for anyone to know what was really going on in that vehicle in the lead up to the crash.
We know there was vodka, some weed, she's acting weird to say the least, etc but too many puzzle pieces are missing for anything beyond speculation.
I actually agree it was probably a spur of the moment suicide, whether from the liquor or a psychotic break (an incident like Ann Heche) but like I said, we'll never know.
If this happened today with how each kid would probably have a tablet or smart phone running in the vehicle, they could probably piece it together much easier.
Many cases have varying degrees of unanswered questions. LE can find out who did something but never find out the whys and hows.
I remember a story my mom told me about one of her friends in her youth, a girl she had went to elementary school with, although her death happened when she was in college.
She was walking home, merely a few blocks from school. She got into a car with some guy and they were killed in a car accident.
Her mother could never figure out why she bothered to get in his car when she was so close to the house.
She'll never know.
I’ve totally done a similar thing minus the fatal car crash. In my case I was either hopping in just to be friendly and so we could chat a bit; my feet hurt because I was wearing stylish shoes or we changed plans because we met and decided to go somewhere else. Or any combination of those.
The crash was investigated and we still don't have definitive answers, that's why people are still discussing it 15 years later. The biggest question imo is whether she did it on purpose or not and she's the only person who could tell us that.
The phone call with her brother may have something of an answer to that question, but maybe not, and I don’t think we will ever know.
I don’t think there were as many cameras on NY roads back then. Now they are everywhere, but not when I was growing up there. This would’ve been probably early in the process of making them commonplace.
I tend to think she was pretty "blacked out" by the time she entered the parkway the wrong way and much of the driving itself was likely muscle memory, and not an intentional crash. I'd guess she often drank a lot (often secretly and inappropriately) and thought she could handle being a little drunk for a 40ish min drive home and kids wouldn't notice, but then she lost track of how much she drank, smoked a joint or maybe took an edible because she thought that might help her get it together (counterintuitive but some people think this way), and maybe even continued to drink while pretty blacked out because that too was instinct, also while getting drunker as all the alcohol she drank in a short span continued to hit her. I think the trip was taking so long because she was extremely disoriented/lost due to intoxication (also stopped for food, meds, to puke, maybe ingest weed, make calls...) and called her brother for the final time because she knew she needed help--was purportedly struggling to see/speak clearly, and the kids knew she wasn't right at this point, but she knew life as she knew it would be ruined if she was caught, so she tried to continue home, and/or was so drunk she just autopilot continued on and likely forgot her phone on the side of the road because drunk people lose/forget things--really don't think see that as intentional. People say she looked focused or determined while driving the wrong way, like she was on a mission, which some interpret as a murder/suicide mission, but idk, I feel that look could easily come from being blacked out and in sorta autopilot.
Oftentimes drunks drive by focusing on the car in front of them. It’s a technique for keeping the car on the road when you’re too impaired to sense your general surroundings. I suspect this is why she looked so intensely focused.
Interesting! Makes sense though because when things are wobbly like that and you can’t close your eyes, you have to focus on something “unmoving” (terrible word choice but I’m sure you follow) to help calm down the spinning and probably exhaustion too at that point. Add in weed and you could be really jacked.
Definitely possible for prior to the parkway, but when she was going the wrong way/ wouldn't be able to focus on the car in front of her, people said she looked super determined/focused
I just want to know what that last phone call to her brother consisted of. I think that could be the answer to whether she did it intentionally or not. There seemed to be a lot of dysfunction in that family the documentary couldn't even scrape the top of
100%. also how much denial the family is in. i really sincerely hope diane was in a blackout that day. it really is unfortunate that any answers died with diane
It struck me how Dianne's sister smokes a cigarette in the film and tells the film crew that no one in her family knew she was a smoker. Meanwhile, she claims to have known everything about Dianne's personal habits.
Yeah this was the summary of the whole story to me. A family of people who aren’t actually connected, and also think they’re hiding things better than they are. But no one cares enough to ask or offer help. Like yeah sure honey I’m sure no one ever smelled smoke on you! So much denial and shame and lack of connection.
Yes this moment was SO illustrative to me. It says something about their family culture of hiding things from each other.
I think this is very common, along with family members willfully 'overlooking' fairly obvious things because it's just easier to keep the family intact. Lots of mutual 'I hid it' and 'I didn't see it'.
I think they just deny so they aren’t sued. Still annoying to watch and I never wanted to slap someone so bad lol. Didn’t they also have buttafucco’s lawyer? My mom had met with him at some point many years ago I could’ve sworn I joked with her look who it is! I’m from their area.
They did, the lawyer alludes to it briefly in the documentary saying that's why they hired him, bc they wanted publicity
I know what you mean; she kept saying "this isn't her" in reference to this sort of thing being out of Diane's character. And they were saying she didn't smoke weed, but then talked about her smoking weed. Total denial or lies.
Families of people who do terrible things are frequently in denial (either they know and are lying, or it’s just disbelief). There was a murder in CT 5 years ago this month-husband planned and murdered his wife, with the assistance of his girlfriend…she was recently convicted on all 6 charges against her, but her family is all over the media and social media, proclaiming her innocence, and disparaging the murder victim. It’s clear the woman was fully involved, but like Diane’s family, continue to maintain that she isn’t guilty of an intentional act.
yep. she drove drunk and killed almost everyone. i have no sympathy for her or whether she had a fkng toothache or not. rip to the innocent humans she killed
I believe that she did. I think that it had something to do with her mother, and her brother having a relationship with her. Iirc he even introduced her to Diane's kids. The kids may have been talking about grandma and that set her off.
Whatever the reason is, the family most definitely knows it.
I tend to go with no and that she was just schwasted and lost it, basically. I think she was still a little drunk from the night before and drank more and it hit her. I think she probably smoked a little too. Black out and anything can happen, really. I’ve smoked and drank too much and suddenly everything is spinning and leaning and stuff.
Your functionality is all jacked up, including your inhibitions- she may have really thought she was driving the right way or maybe she reacted poorly to the kids freaking out. Those are just my thoughts, though.
I feel like she must have. Even though I have my doubts, I cannot fathom why she would get trashed on that ride with the kids for any other reason.
Just want to chime in here. Edit: Should preface that I'm speaking from experience (4 years sober) .. just realized thats probably important
High functioning addicts need to compartmentalize their vice and over time as the addition deepens and the mental gymnastics they've told to themselves about their addiction are far from any basis in reality.
She had a day where the two worlds all the efforts went into to ensure they never touch, are starting to touch, and when that happens shit can spiral very fast depending on the person.
She made some really bad choices that day but keep in mind those were choices that she made probably daily without much incident. Whatever caused her to take more than normal we'll never know but my theory is the edible put her over the edge and she wasn't expecting it - getting a "bad trip" (adding to the confusion), all those kids around, the two worlds are touching but there are no adults around so she has time to figure her shit out...and in this stoned fog of confusion and kids in the car created a situation where she just didn't realize what she did until it was too late.
Exactly. She was thrown off her usual routine in a bad way and I imagine that she might've had a firm plan for the weekend which might've been further thrown off when her husband left with the dog. She might've counted on him taking the kids and her staying behind; when that didn't happen, things spiraled for her.
I actually don't fully recall what the toxicology was. It was just weed and liquor right, but like a fuck ton of each?
It also just occured to me that in that UK at that time she had to be illegally getting that edible and black market edibles can be a wild ride, hell, 50% of the time your own damn batch was a wild ride.
edit: I'm reading she smoked 15 minutes before the crash? I remember no one seeing anything and her not being known to get stoned and her loved ones said she would never get loaded around the kids, driving them home at that. But I also remember an edible?
congrats on 4 years!
I know it’s not our business but I wish we knew the contents of that phone call between her and the girls dad before the crash.
i really think that holds the key to whether diane was deliberate or not. personally, i think the fact that her brother won’t say what happened, means there’s something he may not want to say. could be as simple as his last words were “fck you, what the fck are you doing” or something and he feels guilty. i don’t think it was some huge bombshell moment though. maybe they argued and he figured it out, but didn’t want to sell out his sister for a DUI, so he said, hey i’m gonna get her myself. whatever small thing it was, they probably did not end the phone call very well.
in regard to the last conversation between emma and her parents, i don’t even want to think about that. poor babies were probably so terrified and confused.
i think that phone call is where diane’s wall came down, and she was toast. she either said ok, we’re all gonna die. or, her blacked out self was so focused on the road to get home before anyone else noticed. we will never know, unfortunately
Well weren't they his kids she was driving? If I was on the phone with my very clearly drunk sister who was driving with my kids in the backseat idk how nice I could be either.
I always thought it was telling that after that call she simply abandoned her phone. Like she knew she wouldn't be needing it anymore. That detail is what really makes me think this was intentional--that she felt like she couldn't recover from whatever was said during that phone call.
Hmm I don't know. I was a pretty bad alcoholic in my late 20s/early 30s and a lot of what she did felt familiar to me. If you get the "hangxiety" from drinking the night before you start to try and chase it away with other alcohol because you're not a normal person who would just suffer through it.
I got the feeling that she thought she could trooper through it for a bit there and was mixing vodka into the OJ, for instance, to just get home.
Going off the parkway like she did didn't feel like a planned suicide attempt so much as the intrusive thoughts that come with hangxiety, and anxiety in general, taking over for a brief period and this just happened to be the worst case scenario.
I remember that before I was an alcoholic, I was getting intrusive thoughts all the time because of concussions playing sports previously to the point where I was scared to drive over bridges because I'd get a weird urge to just veer off. I thought I was suicidal or something until I hear of several professional athletes who found the same thoughts creeping into their heads after concussions. The brain is a delicate, delicate thing.
thanks so much for your insight! i hope you’re recovering and sober. wishing you the best
Wow I never knew that about concussions! Scary stuff.
I agree with this and maybe not even intrusive thoughts, maybe just blacked out and not seeing reality or being physically out of it like spinning/wobbly/passing out. I could see someone snapping to and being like “I need to turn around!” And just DOING IT. The kids freaking out threw her off as well I’m sure.
something happened between her and her husband. an argument and harsh words
I think that too. She argued with her husband on the trip, and he went home and left her with the kids. I think that the key is her mother coming back into their lives. I used to be in a lot of Facebook groups and occasionally someone would spill a droplet of info.
Yes, Diane's mother walked out on the family when Diane was 9. Diane had to step up into the role her mother abandoned, when she was still a child herself. From what I've read, Diane's father did not handle it well and dumped a lot on her shoulders.
This is why friends and loved ones described her as being so capable and "in control". It wasn't by choice, but necessity.
From the info I've gleaned over the years, Diane would not talk to or about her mother. Allegedly, Diane's brother was allowing their mom back into their lives, and I think Diane had a real problem with that.
I think she had a lot of problems with Danny, too. Years ago, there was a really good article on People You Will See in Hell that tied it all together, claiming it was murder-suicide. But I think the website has been taken down.
i think she drank more then she meant too, didn’t have anything to eat so it hit her really really hard and then mixed it with weed and got way more fucked up then anticipated. and wrecked by accident
That's a fair theory. But CHUG vodka? And then add weed? Like, DAMN girl.
I don't think she chugged it - she probably was drunk from the night before and kept on drinking by adding vodka to whatever drink she had at the moment.
Possibly kept drinking more vodka after she was blacked out–thinking it was water, or just pure muscle memory.
I tend to think no. She was beyond fucked up... the odds of her having an accident are ridiculously high. I don't see why people would expect that she would do that if there was no other indication of it. If she was that inebriated, it wouldn't take much for her to have the accident she did without ANYTHING purposeful on her end.
It's a horrible tragedy, but without any evidence indicating intent, I don't know why people assume it was murder/suicide. People have awful accidents all the time.
A chronic, functional alcoholic who was able to hide it until she wasn’t. Unfortunately with deadly consequences for many innocent people.
My uncle did just this! He didn't have any catastrophic consequences - just your regular old get a DUI, but it could have been so bad. I don't know if my Aunt was in denial or what - but she said she had no clue - in my opinion it was pretty obvious though.
The husband's behavior after the toxicology report establishes a pattern of denial IMO.
Denial of enablers is something else. My mom thinks my dad is sober because he isn’t drinking but he’s popping Vicodin for a toothache. It is a sickness not unlike alcoholism. So sad.
But why did she volunteer to drive all the kids if she planned on getting shit faced? Even the kids were like whoa. Why did she go balls on that drive? I don't get it.
When you're an alcoholic, you don't "plan" on getting shitfaced - infact, I'd say most alcoholics try to avoid that scenario, it just happens because you're addicted. You don't know when to stop.
Drinking and driving just become what you do because you've certainly done it a few times and "nothing bad" happened then. So false security because you think you've got it under control. I think the only reason this case "baffles" anyone is because they don't have experience with alcoholics.
This 100%, you plan to not drink.
Yeah, I’m shocked by the addiction education people lack. I guess my families/friends are all hot messes. 😂
I've always felt the exact same way. Nothing I saw in the documentrary was anything I hadn't seen before.
She had no choice to drive them home. She borrowed her brothers van and all the car seats were in that. Her husband had the dog in the truck and was going home to sleep before his shift and she was picking her own vehicle up from her brothers house where she parked it.
What gets me about this case though is that Diane's behavior is so extreme, it is really late stage, if not end stage, alcoholism. If she had to drink that much, that early, even while driving, and throw weed on top of it, she was truly far gone. And thus I'm surprised that she would be able to live a functional life, not have people around her suspicious (and it isn't just the awful husband, apparently nobody knew), and not show permanent signs of alcoholism in her autopsy. I say this as someone who was a serious alcoholic and a morning drinker. At that point, you are basically crumbling. Even just physically, you LOOK like a drunk. The whole thing is so odd to me. I do believe it qualifies as a mystery.
I wouldn't say nobody knew - in the documentary, you get the impression her co-worker had noticed but refrained from saying it out loud due to the family's denial.
0.19 BAC isn’t all that high for a chronic heavy drinker, though. I’ve known a couple who seemed sober at that level, and who were still walking and talking intelligibly with BACs over 0.3.
So I would guess that her regular drinking was at a lower maintenance level. My grandma was the second kind of alcoholic - she never got drunk, but she always had her little medicine bottle of bourbon in her purse. Most people wouldn’t have known she had a problem.
This. Also, in my limited experience this style of alcoholism is associated with self medicating for mental illness. I’ve heard it was super common with women in the 50’s and 60’s to just sip on something all day without ever being visibly drunk.
My Mom had a friend who’s mother cracked open a beer the minute she woke up and sipped on them all day to no notable ill effect. When her doctor demanded she stop drinking she had a full manic depressive psychotic break. You can absolutely hold mental illness at bay with alcohol and many people have throughout history.
Didn't she have ten undigested shots in her stomach though? Ha, I walked into rehab with a .4. they were like how are you standing ??
She had no sign of liver disease or chronic use of alcohol though
My very nasty alcoholic father does not have any issues with his liver whatsoever, while all his booze brothers went to hell by cirrhosis by now. My father has been an alcoholic since his late 20s the latest and he's 81 now. He started to obviously develop alcoholic neuropathy in lower spine for leg usage in the past 3 years or so. It's pretty rare in that form because most drinkers die at liver cirrhosis well before they could develop neuropathy.
That isn't unusual for someone who is only 36, liver damage can take decades of alcohol abuse.
She was only 36, maybe she was genetically lucky to have a liver that functioned really efficiently, and the effects would have hit quite abruptly when she was in her 40s. She could also have gradually been upping her intake from moderate intake in her 20s.
Some people seem to just get lucky. My mom has multiple glasses of wine every single night, to the point of tipsiness, and has my entire 35 years of life. She had to go a couple nights without for a medical procedure once, and I wondered if she’d feel any physical withdrawal and she did not.
My father is a pretty hard-core alcoholic, but fit, and his check ups always came with flying colors especially for the liver, I don't get it.
I disagree-end stage is seizures and coughing/peeing/vomiting blood and bleeding from your throat, severe liver disease to the point your stomach is distended, yellowing-especially the eyes, kidney issues, etc etc
But she didnt look like a drunk to anyone. Even to me seeing her on the CCTV at the gas station. I feel perplexed by this case. I know it should be case closed from the tox screens, but I can't shake it.