March 26 | Jim Thompson

March 21, 1906 - disappeared March 26, 1967: Age 61

Jim Thompson was an American businessman who was a military intelligence officer during WWII. After the war, he was stationed in Thailand for a year, and there he saw lots of opportunity for development in Thai business. He moved permanently to Bangkok and founded the Thai Silk Company. The company revitalized the home-weaving industry of Thailand, bringing thousands of unemployed Thais back out of poverty and making millionaires of his core worker-shareholders.

During Easter 1967, he went on holiday at a resort in Malaysia. On Sunday afternoon we went for a short walking, leaving his cigarettes behind. He never returned, and despite intense searching by tracking experts, no traces of him were ever found. The most likely explanation is that he was accidentally murdered in a robbery or fell into an animal trap, and was buried by the local indigenous people for fear of reprisal.

Sources: Wikipedia, Cameron Highlands

December 11 | Hugh Scrutton

September 13, 1947 - December 11, 1985: age 38

Hugh Scrutton owned a computer rental store in Sacramento, California. He left his computer rental store at Century Plaza shopping center for lunch at about noon, when he stopped to pick up what he may have thought to be litter. It was a pipe bomb concealed in a wooden box. The bomb exploded, sending shrapnel as far as 150 feet. Scrutton took the full force of the blast in his chest. Metal shrapnel penetrated his heart and tore off his right hand.

Scrutton was a victim of the Unabomber, an America terrorist who carried out a bombing campaign from the late 1970 through to the mid 1990s.

Sources: Wikipedia, The Unabomber Pages