Unsolved Casino Mysteries of All Time

Welcome to the dark side of the gambling industry.

On the 14th of January, 1983, Terri McClure left her Reno residence to attend her son’s wedding in Lake Tahoe. Following the wedding, Terri gambled at a nearby casino before driving back to Reno. When her son, Tim, visited the next day, he found that his mother hadn’t come home the previous night.

Two days later, the police found Terri dead in her car at a parking lot in Carson City. She was shot twice. The preliminary investigation named Tim the main suspect after a few discrepancies in his story. Tim was also the sole beneficiary of his mother’s C$10,000 life insurance.

Tim claimed that he gambled alone for two hours after walking Terri to her car on his wedding night. However, his alibi couldn’t be verified. The polygraph test on his wife and Tim concluded that both were lying. What’s odd is Tim had called Terri’s credit card company to cancel one of her cards even before she went missing.

Tim claims that he cancelled the cards after the disappearance, but the employee noted the date incorrectly. Tim was charged with the murder in September 1992. However, the Nevada District Attorney didn’t prosecute him, citing a lack of evidence. The case ended with prejudice, meaning Tim can’t be blamed for the same crime. The case remains a mystery to this day.

Trevor Angell, a resident of Calgary, Alberta, worked as a trucker transporting goods between the US and Canada in 2000. On the 19th of September, Angell dropped off a consignment in Los Angeles and picked up another load for transporting to Canada.

During this trip, Angell called his wife to complain about the lack of sleep and told her he wanted to quit. On September 22, he briefly spoke with an adjuster, the last time anybody talked to him. Angell’s truck was found in the parking lot of Whiskey Pete’s Hotel.

He loved gambling and frequently stopped at Whiskey Pete’s. The cargo was intact, and the truck was fuelled up. His wallet was found empty. Over the next couple of days, Angell’s ATM card was used to clear his bank account. Nobody knows whether Angell used it himself.

However, a few hours after the last ATM withdrawal, a waitress at the casino claimed to have given Angell some oatmeal. Witnesses also claimed to have seen Angell leave the parking lot seeming distressed and disoriented. In 2001, investigators concluded that Angell staged the disappearance. But he was never found.

In the early hours of the 9th of November in 2003, a slot machine incumbent in Horizon Casino in Mississippi was heckled by a masked robber when they stepped outside the employee exit for a break. The man drew a bead on the employee to get in.

The armed assailant then proceeded to the cash cage and demanded that the employees hand over the cash. He also announced that a few explosives had been placed in the building. The robber escaped with C$60,000 in cash.

The venue was evacuated, and after a thorough search, the authorities recovered a shoebox wrapped in duct tape. The “bomb” was a hoax. What’s interesting is that an anonymous caller had phoned the nearby Rainbow Casino about a bomb threat a few hours prior. Investigators believed that the robber raised a false alarm to distract authorities. The plan worked, and the case remains unsolved after all these years.

Agnes le Roux was the inheritrix of Palais de la Mediterranee, a casino hotel in Nice, France. Her mother operated the casino and refused to let her daughter have her inheritance.

With the help of lawyer Jean-Maurice Agnelet, her lover, Le Roux, sold her shares to a rival establishment for three million francs. The amount was transferred to Le Roux-Agnelet’s joint account. On the night of October 30, 1977, the heiress was appeared getting out of Nice before mysteriously disappearing.

Agnelet had a mistress, and the money from the sale was soon transferred to her joint account with the other woman. Although the mistress initially provided Agnelet with an excuse for the day of Le Roux’s disappearance, she later confirmed that was false. Agnelet was charged with le Roux’s murder.

He was acquitted in 2006 by the decision was overturned by appeal. Agnelet had a 20-year sentence that the European Court of Human Rights rejected. Jean-Maurice Agnelet was retired in 2014.

The case remains mysterious as a former mobster claims le Roux’s disappearance was a mob hit. No matter the truth, le Roux’s body was never discovered.

In May 1996, Gail Anne Thompson and her husband Bobby planned to spend the weekend gambling in Cactus Pete’s Resort Casino, Nevada. Another couple accompanied them.

Bobby and the couple went to their respective hotel rooms as Gail gambled the following evening. Bobby found that his wife hadn’t been to bed when he woke up the next day. They searched the other casinos before filing a missing person’s report.

On May 6, the police recovered Gail’s body from a ditch. Her head was smashed with a blunt thing and her neck slit. None of her possession was missing. The police claimed Bobby was surprisingly chilled as his wife was missing. And the other couple suggested there was animosity between Bobby and Gail.

However, Bobby wasn’t arrested due to a lack of evidence, and he remarried for the fifth time just three months after Gail’s demise. Bobby was dead in 2000, taking the answers to the unsolved murder with him to the grave.