The craziest murder alibi...that someone actually got away with, and it happened in Florida!

''A cartoon character did it''

Murderer: Edward Brian McCleary (16)

Date of murder(s): March 24 1962

Location: Pensacola, Florida

Was alibi successful? Yes

Murder victim(s): 4 (14-year old Bradford Jay Rice, 16-year old Eric Ruyle, 16-year old Warren Ray Salley, and 17-year old Larry Stuart Bill). 

Murder weapon(s): Spear-gun (?)

Facepalm points: 10/10

It's not every day that five teenage boys all go missing during a fairly routine recreational activity. It's also not every day that the reason for their going missing is because of a cartoon character - but that's precisely what happened on March 24, 1962, according to Edward Brian McCleary! This is by far the single most ridiculous murder alibi that we've come across, so we decided that we had to include it because we both love a good ''whudunnit?!'' mystery.  This one has quite an unusual cult following, as well, that we'll get to later on. Stay tuned, folks! 

McCleary had moved to Florida from his home State of New York. He was particularly fond of diving, and on March 24, 1962, McCleary and the four other teenagers set off to launch their 7-man Air Force rescue raft off the coast of Pensacola, armed with swim-fins, spear-guns, shark guns, and swim-suits. Their destination was the then semi-submerged wreckage of the USS Massachusetts, which had been deliberately sunk about 2 miles off the coast of Pensacola, in water no deeper than thirty feet. 

Or was it?

The five boys didn't return when they were supposed to which caused the Coast Guard and the US Navy to issue a search and rescue crew to search for the missing boys. The following morning, at 7:45 AM on Sunday, 25th of March, McCleary was found sleeping on a beach by  the Pensacola's Naval Air Station helicopter crewmen. He was then taken to the local Naval hospital where he was treated for exposure and shock. 

Upon being asked as to what had happened, McCleary immediately told a most outstanding tale. He told everyone that their raft was swept out to sea by a thunderstorm, causing them to jump onto a buoy just beyond the wreckage site. From there, they were in a 'dense fog'. McCleary stated that suddenly everything went inexplicably quiet - the howling wind, the stormy waves, and the gulls had all gone eerily quiet. 

From out of the fog McCleary reported that he saw what looked like a long pole, about 10 feet high, sticking straight up out of the water. Atop this pole was a ''bulb-like structure'', and from here, the air was filled with the ''sickening odour like that of a dead fish''. The figure kept re-appearing; each time getting closer to the buoy. The five boys all dove into the water and McCleary yelled at them to try for the ship. 

McCleary stated that he didn't know how long it was until he heard a scream. He tells that he heard of a horrible, ear-piercing scream coming from Bradford Rice that lasted for what seemed like half a minute;

''I heard Warren call; ''it's got Brad! Hey, help me! I gotta get out of here-'' 

This was followed by a short cry coming from Warren, then silence. From there, McCleary was swimming with Larry Bill and Eric Ruyle. After a while, they noticed Larry wasn't swimming with them anymore, so they went looking for him, but to no avail. Eric grimaced and then sank, with McCleary helping him up. ''What's wrong?'' McCleary said. ''Cramps'' Ruyle responded. 

It was now pitch-dark, and McCleary said he and Ruyle were swimming for hours. Suddenly, as they were about to give up, a flash of lightning illuminated the silhouette of the shipwreck. ''We're saved'' said McCleary. 

Then, suddenly and out of nowhere, the long pole like figure surfaced again, within a couple feet of McCleary was Ruyle swimming a few feet in front of him, right next to the shipwreck. McCleary said he saw it open its mouth and then bend in the middle, diving on top of Ruyle, and dragging him underwater, where he was not seen again. From there McCleary fast-forwards to when he was on the beach, stating he didn't know what happened after seeing Ruyle be killed by the creature.

The following newspaper clippings omit all mentions of the monster, with McCleary explaining that the newspapers had told him to omit the parts about the monster, which ''was better left unmentioned for all those concerned.'' 

Indeed, as this news clipping bears no mention of the fantastical beast;

In 1965, three years after the incident, McCleary began his correspondence with Loch Ness Monster researcher Tims Dinsdale and Fate Magazine, a magazine you submit to when you really want to submit some makey-uppey stuff, but aren't entirely sure whether or not you want to compete with J.K Rowling and deal with the backlash of your work on the goldmine that is Twitter. In his letter to Tims Dinsdale, McCleary disclosed this drawing of the 'monster', which he says was green in colour, with oval eyes, about 10 feet high, and had some kind of dorsal fin on the back of its head...

Hmm.

Green in colour, 10 feet tall, oval eyes, a turtle-like head, and ''some kind of dorsal fin'' on the back of its head? We're also noticing the three long eyelashes that McCleary painstakingly drew near the creature's eyes. Where have we seen this before?

The following image is from the animated series ''Cecil and Beany''. The green monster is named Cecil, and is described as being 10 feet tall in the opening lyrics of the series. The show had aired three times on March 24, 1962, and had only began airing in McCleary's State on January 6th, 1962. 

We have to say; the resemblance is striking. Stupendously, suspiciously striking.

Despite the wide-scale search issued by E. E. McGovern and others, only one of the bodies were found - the body of Bradford Jay Rice, which washed ashore on the 31st of March, and likely in a state too deteriorated to rule out foul p
lay, as bodies tend to rot at a much faster rate in sea water, and sea life tends to take care of a free, easy meal pretty quickly. 

Needless to say, McCleary's Fate Magazine report read a lot more like someone's fantasy than an actual recollection of the events. The following is the entirety of the excerpt written by McCleary, and he doesn't half dawdle on - a bit like us, except McCleary's excerpt bears the authenticity and intonation that isn't too dissimilar from the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, infamous for the statement "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Indeed, there's nothing like convincing people that you're totally not lying and being deceptive by going into excessive, emotionally-ridden story-book like detail about what totally really happened and even the sea monster clapped!

Uh huh...

 

According to McCleary, both him and his friends are precocious enough that they are setting out to sea completely unsupervised and are capable of this kind of poetic language, and yet all five of them still believe in makey-uppey monsters. Nope, we ain't buying it for a billion, chief. You now owe us a pack of cigarettes.

The story continues...

''All five of us put on our fins and dove into the water''

If this is true, McCleary, then why were swim-fins found in the washed up dinghy? What could have taken your friends aback so quickly that they were unable to put on their swim-fins and swim away, and why are you lying about your friends putting on swim-fins when the swim-fins were found in the washed-up dinghy?

What kind of ''terrible secrets'' are you talking about, McCleary? 

While McCleary never explicitly stated that the 'monster' was the Cecil character, the implications are too great to be put down as mere coincidence. This seems to be a case of what is known as ''lying by omission'', which wouldn't be too out of place considering McCleary's demonstrably false lies that I picked up on while reading his account. Lying by omission is prevalent in David Paulides's ''Missing 411'' books. While they do not explicitly state ''Bigfoot ate em'', Paulides is a believer in Bigfoot and makes the implication that Bigfoot is snatching away hikers in America's national parks.

Case in point; there are no real animals that McCleary could have mis-identified as looking like Cecil, given the complete context of the creature's colour and other features which were reportedly seen by McCleary at point-blank range. Allegedly, in his later years McCleary had contacted several members of the ''Whatliesbeyond'' forum, which is about as credible as Fate Magazine. Corresponding with internet pranksters who also claimed to have spotted Cecil in the wild in Florida, McCleary demanded the telephone numbers of anyone claiming to having seen him. 

Suffice to say, McCleary's symptoms of psychosis didn't appear to lessen to any extent - even after many decades, and with the advent of the internet. McCleary himself passed away on February 24, 2016;

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/jacksonville-fl/edward-mccleary-6819524

''Hug life''? Good one, Mr McCleary, we're now dearly hoping that the cat on that shirt didn't inexplicably go missing due to some creature that bared a suspicious resemblance to cartoon characters followed by an entire horror novel on it...

Our dearest condolences to the cat if that was the case...

We conducted a poll on this case for others interested in true crime. The general consensus (57.58% of people) was (unsurprisingly so) that McCleary murdered his friends and invented the monster story as both a cover story and an insanity plea. 

While we both agree that McCleary was off his rocker, we also have to admit that (unfortunately) he was a very clever guy - which happens all too often with many murderers and makes us depressed at the wasted potential. But we digress... 

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that McCleary claimed that he was ''hearing voices'' shortly after the incident. According to nami.org (https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness/Mental-Health-Conditions/Schizophrenia) the average age of onset of schizophrenia tends to be in the late teens to early twenties. McCleary was 16 at the time, and his most notable activity occurred in 1965, when he was 19 years old. While most schizophrenics are harmless, there have been cases where schizophrenics have murdered people ''out of the blue'', such as the case of Will Baker, a Canadian who brutally beheaded a passenger on a Greyhound bus in 2008.

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/11/mentally-ill-man-who-beheaded-bus-passenger-is-freed-from-all-supervision

We also know that McCleary may have had a 'motive' (he was showing schizophrenia symptoms such as hearing voices) and that he also had a weapon (spear-gun). Another possibility is McCleary wasn't actually hearing voices but included that in his report to fake a mental illness, which can result in reduced murder sentences in many US States. 

McCleary lied about the weather in his Fate Magazine report. An archive search of the Old Farmer's Almanac for Pensacola, FL, on March 24, 1962, tells something quite different to what McCleary is telling us in his little novel here. 

No precipitation, fog, storms, or gale-force winds were recorded on March 24, 1962. If McCleary can't even be honest about something as simple as the weather, why should we trust him on other parts of his story?

We stated earlier that this case has somewhat of a cult following, and this is true. McCleary is held up as somewhat of a Saint - a tragic victim to the supernatural and a hero of sorts. We at the BeyondStupidity blog have a policy against outright nonsense for the conservation of vulnerable brain cells (CoVBC) and will tell you what we actually think, regardless of the amount of nonsense posted about it. 

Popular among cryptozoologists, the McCleary case is held up as a gospel. For those who aren't aware, the ''zoology'' part of cryptozoology refers to the study of animals, and the ''crypto'' part refers to ''shit we made up.'' According to cryptozoologists, a name that makes actual zoologists facepalm, every mythological animal is a ''cryptid'' - including dragons, mermaids, and Super Mario. Unsurprisingly, a large percentage of so-called cryptozoologists are Young Earth Creationists who believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old and are particularly interested on mythological creatures described in the Bible. 

Some common defences that we've seen amongst McCleary-stans are; 

''The ocean is only 5 percent explored! Cecil could very well exist!'' 

This is a common excuse among cryptozoologists as to why ocean-going ''cryptids'' have not been ''discovered''. Unfortunately for them, almost every ocean-going cryptid is a novel species that would belong to a completely novel clade or order (clade and order are taxonomic categories used to categorize types of animals, and also gives people an idea of which animals are related to what, and what they evolved from). Not only that, but almost every ocean-going cryptid is either a marine reptile or a marine mammal-fish thingy. Both mammals and marine reptiles are not fishes and require air to breathe using their lungs. They have to come to the surface constantly, and cannot linger at depths due to pressure differences, freezing water, darkness, and being far away from the nearest source of breathable oxygen. 

Hmm. 

Freezing cold, dark, far from any light or air, no food, sounds like a perfect place for a whale-sized, cold-blooded carnivorous reptile to hang out if you don't know what you're talking about. 

Not only that, but this is also a common myth; only 5% of the ocean floor has been mapped to a certain resolution. Marine reptiles are not sunken cities and as such, would not be found in the Mariana's Trench and doesn't mean that fictional characters live down there. Sorry guys. 

Source:

http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/oceans/2014/10/04/mapping-the-deep-and-the-real-story-behind-the-95-unexplored-oceans/

''New species are discovered every year! Cecil could very well exist!'' 

This is another excuse we've seen for people who believe that McCleary is innocent, and we ain't buying it either. This is like us saying that because we meet new people every year, including Bob and Joe, that means that Superman could very well exist. We're not sure what this fallacy is called, but it certainly seems like one. 

The species we're discovering are either small, not novel, or are variants of other species. Just last year a new species of beaked whale was discovered, however it bared such a similar resemblance to another species that any layman would have confused it for the same species, had it not been that the observers in this case were scientists tasked with classifying new species. As of 2020, based on the rate of discovery, there are an estimated 8 marine mammals yet to be discovered, and 10 marine reptiles, including 4 species of sea snakes, and about 5,000 species of fish. The rest are things like plankton, bacteria, protozoa, and other small creatures that most people aren't interested in. That doesn't make much room for the novel clade/order of mermaids, living plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, sea-serpents, and Cthulhu. (Apologies to H. P. Lovecraft fans everywhere)

We have fossils of every single 'type' of animal in the ocean. We have fossils of whales, sea-snakes, dolphins, seals, manatees, and even of species that do not fossilize well due to cartilage tissue, such as megalodon and other sharks. Yet, we have not a single fossil of post-Cretaceous plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, mermaids, or Cthulhu. We also have satellite imagery of whales taken from space in regions of the ocean where humans are sparse - which begs the question; why are there no plesiosaur-shaped things being spotted? A reptile would be far more likely to bask at the surface of the ocean - especially in the case of plesiosaurs which preferred shallow seas - areas that tens of thousands of boats and ships traverse every single day. 

''He made up the story because of the trauma of seeing his friends drown!'' 

Believe us, we want this theory to be true. However, we find it doesn't stand up to logic for several reasons;

1. If someone makes up a story due to trauma, it's usually because the made up story is less traumatic than what actually happened. An example of this in fiction that was demonstrated very well is 'Life of Pi' - a great read that was also made into a feature film. The story of Pi and the tiger was less traumatic than what really happened - Pi's mother was killed by the cook, and then Pi was forced to eat the body, which was symbolized as a 'carnivorous island'. 

McCleary's story is far more traumatizing than abandoning a raft and swimming to shore, but never actually seeing any of your friends go under, which is what McCleary mentioned in the official press release. 

That is, unless McCleary murdered his friends with a spear-gun, and he invented the story of a monster killing them to cope with the fact that he killed them. That would make his memory of killing them less traumatizing, but would not make a memory of him swimming to shore but not seeing his friends drown less traumatizing. 

2. McCleary seemed adamant on trying to prove his alibi true - by corresponding with members of the Whatliesbeyond forum, and also previously with Tims Dinsdale and Fate Magazine. If you make something up due to trauma, you'd get therapy to address what happened. Unless of course, what really happened was something McCleary never dared to disclose. 

3. Only one body washed ashore in an area where things always wash ashore. Why then, did the other three bodies never wash ashore? What happened to them? If you murder someone at sea, there are ways of making sure that bodies don't wash up. Several Mafia members would dispose of bodies at sea for this reason. The fact that most of the bodies didn't wash ashore (when the raft did) points to something unusual happening that day. 

Cecil and Beany: Adult Swim edition!

Conclusion:

We find it's quite startling that the death of Azaria Chamberlain was seen as suspicious enough that the mother was arrested, but McCleary's story garnered no suspicion from the authorities at the time. Unfortunately, part of McCleary's cult-following (not unlike the Ted Bundy fandom, which considers ''Electric Chair'' a ''slur'') appeals to authority, with the premise that McCleary's story must be true because that's what the authorities believed at the time. 

Unfortunately, because McCleary was never convicted, his victims never received justice, and his cult following is doing a huge disservice to their legacy. While we may not be Christians, or believe in a 'Hell', we will make an exception for the dastardly McCleary, and hope there's a special place in hell that may or may not involve animated sea monsters with bad hygiene...

Regardless, we decided to investigate this case because we have nothing better to do, and also because we want to point out the obvious, in an ocean of beyond stupidity, which may or may not contain animated sea monsters...