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- Hi everyone and welcome back
to another episode. Real quick, if you are watching on YouTube, can you please give this video a thumbs up and turn on notifications? It just really helps with the algorithm and is a great way to support the show. And if you are listening via podcast, if you could just give it a five-star review real quick, then that's it. That's all you have to do. It's that easy. Thank you for joining me again, picking up where we left off last week. I had pondered the question of how many deaths...
that are ruled accidental have actually been murders. Murders that will never be detected. It's the kind of God's eye statistic that we'll never be able to know for sure, right? Like for every murder that's staged to look like an accident, but then ultimately detected thanks to either good police work or a clumsy criminal or a combination of both, how many of these killers actually get away with it?
Sometimes these phony accidents are planned in advance and other times they're staged after the fact. Like maybe when someone goes off the deep end and kills their partner and afterward they hastily arrange things to make it look like an accident. With that scenario, the killer is working from a disadvantage, the lack of planning and in many cases, a race against the clock.
In last week's case, the murder was planned in advance, but the arrogance of the killers is what tripped them up in the end. Today's case is a little bit different. Let's explore why.
In the fall of 2002, Florence Unger's marriage was in trouble. When she married Mark Unger in 1990, she thought she knew her partner well. They had been dating for several years ever since meeting in college when they were younger and their slates cleaner.
Little did Flo, that's what everyone called her, so we'll refer to her that way from now on. Little did Flo know the man she was marrying was not the man he would become. She had no idea what she was getting herself into.
For her husband and the eventual father of her two sons would slowly sink into a variety of addictions. And 12 years into their marriage, he was entering residential rehab for the umpteenth time as he continued struggling with substance abuse, alcoholism, and gambling addiction.
These were both problems that took big repeated bites out of this couple's finances. It's hard to raise two children when one of two parents is sinking larger and larger sums of money into not just their vices, but the cost of living in a rehab facility, which also prevented Mark from working. So the situation in the Unger household had grown pretty dire.
Mark used to work as a radio sportscaster before he became a father, which is when he shifted careers and became a mortgage banker. Incidentally, it was a chance conversation with his friend who worked at a mortgage company that sponsored his radio station that led him into this field, where he was making exponentially more money than he did at the radio station. Both he
Both he and Flo liked nicer things, and now he was making enough money that their lifestyle was within their means. Even though it was stressful work for Mark, and he quickly grew to hate his job and the company he worked for because they were essentially a predatory lender. And Flo, who had worked in retail, left the workforce entirely to become a stay-at-home mom.
but with mark's downward spiral she could no longer be the mom she wanted to be to their two sons because she had to re-enter the workforce i mean if he's out with some of these issues and now at rehab she has to go back to work so flo got a job as a mortgage loan officer at a local bank and was suddenly the family's sole means of support
And when Mark got out of rehab, he continued struggling to find work, remaining unemployed for months. By the summer of 2003, Flo decided enough was enough. She contacted a divorce attorney and they began divorce proceedings in August of that year.
And Mark, having lost control of nearly every aspect of his life, didn't want to lose his wife and potentially his sons. It was, in his mind, the only stable thing in his life, even though the marriage had been eroding for years. Mark had trouble accepting that this is what Flo wanted and needed, so he promised to fight the divorce. And he believed the marriage was salvageable, but...
Flo disagreed. For her, the relationship was beyond repair. Mark saw this all as unfair. He felt that his problems were largely out of his control and not his fault.
so let's back up a bit the marriage was mostly a solid one until 1998 when mark went to see his doctor concerning pain from an old sports injury and he left the office with a prescription for vicodin he quickly became addicted to it and alcohol soon followed and then when the mgm grand opened a casino in nearby detroit
He added a third addiction to his growing roster, and that was gambling. Mark's life spiraled out of control, like I said, and it happened fairly fast. Flo was openly unhappy with the marriage, and for the last few years of it, Mark spent practically more time in rehab than he did with his family. So this is what leads us up to this divorce. I mean, so by the time Flo filed for divorce, she was eager to end the marriage and move on with her life, including her love life.
She had already begun dating someone new who happened to be a close friend of Mark's, which wasn't an easy situation. Mark was growing increasingly combative and he was making it clear he wasn't going to walk away from the relationship easily or amicably. This was not going to be a collaborative process, a conscious uncoupling as Gwyneth Paltrow might call it.
But Flo hoped that maybe things could be smoothed out before the papers were signed. Every year, the Ungers took their family vacation to the west coast of Michigan to the Watervale Resort District in Blaine Township, four hours from where they lived in Huntington Woods, which is a suburb of Detroit.
It was a family tradition, and despite the crumbling marriage and the impending divorce, the Youngers decided to take this trip perhaps one last time. It had been a refuge for them, staying in the resort area on Lower Herring Lake. For Mark, this trip might be a last-ditch effort at saving his marriage and winning Flo back. But for Flo, who had reservations about even going on the trip, it was...
at best, a way to close out the marriage on a note of wistful nostalgia and mutual acceptance, rather than the bitterness that had been taking hold in recent months. So this one last family vacation began on October 24th, 2003, with the family arriving at their rented cottage around noon. It was a Friday afternoon, but the weather was shifting cold and dipping into the 30s.
When they arrived that weekend, the Ungers were the only family staying at Waterville that weekend, aside from the Duncans who owned the resort.
The view from the cottage was serene. Outside, there was a boathouse with a wooden deck on the roof, a spot that was ideal for social gatherings or even just quiet moments of solitude while looking out on the lake. That evening, the Ungers went out to dinner at Dinghy's Restaurant, a place in nearby Frankfurt famous for its barbecue ribs.
And when they returned, they went out to the deck of the boathouse to watch the sunset. Mark laid out a blanket and lit candles. Clearly, he was hoping to reconcile with Flo and repair their marriage, but that's not the path their evening would take.
After the sun went down, a cool breeze began to blow, sometimes sharply, enough to blow out one of their candles. From the pitch blackness of the lake, a fisherman emerged and landed his boat near their deck, turning in for the night. He exchanged greetings with the two, the boys had now gone in, and introduced himself before apologizing for interrupting what he observed to be a romantic interlude.
"'It's no problem,' the Ungers replied in unison. As the fisherman secured his boat, he made some small talk with Flo, who told him, "'I wouldn't want to be out on the lake at this hour. I'm afraid of the dark.'" But in spite of this, not long after the fisherman left, Mark returned to the cottage to tuck the couple's two sons into bed, leaving Flo behind by herself in the dark.
for at least an hour as he read the boys a bedtime story until their eyelids grew heavy and then switched off the lights and went back out to the deck to rejoin his wife but they're separated but they're on this last ditch vacation but when mark gets there to the deck his wife is gone where was she
Mark saw lights on in the neighboring cabin where the resort owners lived. And as he would later explain to the police, he just assumed Flo was with them. And so he continued on to bed, turning on the TV and falling asleep to a movie alone.
The next morning, Mark woke up to find that Flo was still gone. So he knocked on the door of Lynn and Maggie Duncan, the resort owners, and told them his wife was missing. The Duncans got dressed and joined Mark outside to help look for Flo, and they separated, Mark going one way and the Duncans going the other, calling out for Flo, looking for her. And over by the boathouse, the Duncans found her.
floating face down in the lake near a boat launch. Lynn then returned to Mark Unger, who was waiting in front of the cottages, and reached out his hand and placed it gently on Mark's chest. "Mark," he said, "you're not going to like this. She's in the water.
Mark immediately broke down. He began crying and screaming, seemingly out of control with emotion. He ran down toward the boathouse, toward the boat launch, right where his wife's body was, and he jumped into the water right next to her.
And although Lynn Duncan was beside himself by what had been thrust upon his morning, he was still in his right mind enough to note the oddity of Mark somehow knowing exactly where to find his wife's dead body, despite Lynn not telling him, and despite the view of the water being completely obscured by bushes and trees.
The question of how did he know exactly where to go would flash through Lynn's head in that moment. But it was something that he wouldn't think too much about, not right now at least. He filed it away in the back of his mind and attended to more pressing matters, namely getting authorities out to the resort.
His wife Maggie hurried to the phone and dialed 911 telling the emergency operator that a woman staying at their resort had died and she believed it must either be suicide or drowning.
Police arrived shortly after and found Florence Unger's body next to the boat launch, 12 feet below the deck of the boathouse. There was a large bloodstain on the cement apron below the boathouse, and nearby was one of Flo's earrings, some candles, a broken glass candle holder, and a blanket. It was everything Mark had laid out for their romantic lakefront interlude the night before.
The deck railing above where the body was found was splintered and broken, bowed outward toward the lake. It looked as though Flo had either been sitting on or leaning against the railing. The railing then gave way and she fell down to her death, probably hitting her head on the way down, knocking her unconscious before she hit the water and drowned.
But crime scene investigators noticed there was no trail of blood from that sizable blood stain on the cement platform to the edge of the platform where Flo's body had likely entered the water. So it wasn't immediately evident how Flo's body would have made it from the spot where she'd apparently landed to the water several feet away. Because if she had rolled, there would be a blood trail.
The concrete platform where she landed wasn't sloped, so it also doesn't really make sense that she would have rolled down into the water. And even if she had, like I just said, there would have been a blood trail.
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On the deck of the boathouse where the railing was busted, investigators measured the height of the intact portion of the railing and discovered that it didn't meet code. It was 10 inches shy of being standard. And from the looks of it, it appeared to be structurally weak and partially rotted out in spots. So definitely a dangerous place to sit.
Investigators at the scene could easily visualize how one could sit on it and then lose their balance. It really looked like an open and shut case of accidental death. But there were still some things that weren't lining up. Like, for example, the area where the railing was broken didn't line up with the blood stain on the concrete below.
Just as investigators couldn't quite compute how Flo ended up in the water, they also couldn't figure out how she could have fallen diagonally. And another thing authorities noticed that afternoon was how Mark Unger, when he was calling family and friends to inform them of Flo's death, would sob one minute and then be perfectly calm the next. His emotions were sporadic.
He also seemed to be in a hurry to leave. In fact, his car was already all packed up when police arrived at the scene. Packed up and ready to go back home to Huntington Woods with the boys. Not so fast, police thought. We don't know if this is an accident, a suicide, or what happened, they told Mark. Well, it definitely wasn't a suicide, Mark said.
They told Mark either way to stay put for now because they wanted to serve search warrants on his cottage and, before he left, his vehicle. Mark expressed a desire to his friends and family to have Flo's body immediately cremated as soon as possible. Again, another red flag. But the wrench in these plans was what was determined when the body was examined to determine the exact cause of death.
The forensic pathologist in Benzie County, where Waterville was located, determined the cause of death to be traumatic brain injury caused by Florence Unger's fall from the deck onto the pavement below. Pretty obvious. But when the body was taken to Oakland County, where Flo and Mark lived, the medical examiner there made a different determination, which was that Flo had drowned.
No drugs or alcohol were found in Flo's system. She also had abdominal injuries that looked as though they had been caused by something like a fist or a foot. And there was also, as the forensic pathologist had observed, severe head trauma. Head trauma that may not have itself been fatal, but would have knocked Florence unconscious for sure. Maybe even put her in a coma.
So there was no question Flo was unconscious when she entered the water. But was she dead? The size of the blood stain on the concrete deck told the medical examiner that Flo had been lying on that deck in an unconscious state for at least an hour and a half, maybe even as long as two hours. So Mark's story was impossible.
She couldn't have just fallen off the deck, hit her head on the way down and landed in the water. She landed on that concrete and stayed there for at least an hour and a half and then somehow made it into the water. But despite this, Mark stuck to his story and police at this point had no evidence to prove that Florence Unger's death was anything other than a tragic accident or suicide.
The medical examiner's opinion was merely that, an opinion, but opinion informed by, you know, expertise. And it was enough for the police to not let it drop. They had a potential murder case on their hands and they had to consider that and all other possibilities.
Flo's death was a shock to everyone who knew the Ungers. Her family did not believe for a second that Flo would have willingly flung herself off that deck. She wouldn't have left her sons. They meant the world to her. She wasn't suicidal. She never had been. So as far as Flo's family was concerned, it was either an accident or a murder.
Mark's family couldn't believe Mark would have ever hurt Flo. He was crazy about her, from their perspective. But Flo's family saw it differently, and they considered murder to be a distinct possibility. Flo had told her family and friends that she didn't want to go on this family trip with Mark. She was uneasy, in fact. She confided in one of her neighbors that she was frightened.
The situation with Mark since she had filed for divorce had grown increasingly volatile. But even though she was nervous about accompanying Mark on the trip, it was also a reminder of happier times.
and Flo maybe thought it would help soften the acrimony of their split and maybe pave a path to a soft exit on good terms. Investigators spoke to the Ungers, two young sons, and also with the Duncans, the owners of the resort who had found her, and nobody heard any kind of argument or yelling or struggle that night. Surely, if there had been a confrontation, the boathouse was within earshot and it was quiet enough, someone would have heard something.
But suspicion toward Mark intensified once it was learned that Flo had two substantial life insurance policies on her, with Mark as the sole beneficiary. Combined, their payout value was $750,000.
three quarters of a million dollars. And investigators also learned that just days before Flo's death, Mark lost $7,000 during a run of a bum luck while casino gambling. So this provided a motive, as did Mark's unwillingness to accept that the marriage was ending and that Flo was dating his close friend. I mean, it really is motive with a capital M.
And then it was also learned that just days before Flo died, she had served Mark's divorce attorney with a questionnaire that probed his finances. Meanwhile, Mark was threatening to pursue sole custody of the children should she insist on proceeding with the divorce. Now with Flo dead and Mark fast becoming the prime and only suspect, Mark Unger felt the net closing in on him and he was determined to prove his innocence.
So he hired his own private forensic firm to analyze the scene and create visual representations of all the possibilities. And what that firm determined was that the momentum of Florence Unger's 12-foot fall from the deck caused her to bounce and roll forward and off the platform and into the water.
The firm created computer animations depicting five different scenarios showing how this could have happened and concluded that her death was definitely an accident.
But the medical examiner adamantly disagreed. "Bodies do not bounce," he contended, which if you think about it, they really don't. Not unless they're falling into something that gives like a trampoline or an awning. A cement platform does not give. If you've ever had the misfortune of seeing a human body fall from a great height, like a building and hitting concrete, you'll know from having seen it that a human body definitely does not bounce.
And then there was the size of that bloodstain, which was about a foot in diameter. Remember, he had already determined that Flo had been on the cement for no less than 90 minutes before she entered the water, which completely disproved this theory that Flo fell, bounced, and rolled into the water.
Because if it had, her wound wouldn't have bled out to the degree that was evident in that stain. There wouldn't have been time. Flo somehow moved 90 minutes after landing on that platform.
The medical examiner also examined slides of Flo's brain tissue and found repair proteins in her brain that would have been released after her head injury. This is how the brain attempts to heal itself after a traumatic injury by releasing repair proteins.
And those repair proteins were present to such a degree that, once again, it showed there was a substantial time delay between the time Flo sustained her head injury, hitting the ground, and the time she entered the water.
Crime scene analysts returned to the deck to test an unbroken segment of railing using a load cell, which to put it in simple terms is like a scale that measures the amount of weight and tension it would take to say break something like the way that wooden railing was broken. And what they found was that even at 200 pounds of pressure, which was well above Flo's weight, Flo was a petite woman.
The railing remained intact. So now it was looking for sure like this accident scene had somehow been staged and the railing had likely been kicked in to make it look like it had given way and broken when in reality Flo fell over top of it or was pushed over top of it.
Fortunately, detectives had the foresight enough, the day of the accident, to execute search warrants on Mark's car and the cabin where they were staying. And among the items they seized were Mark's shoes. Back at the crime lab, technicians discovered small flecks of white paint on his shoes, which they collected and chemically analyzed.
When they compared this paint to samples they had taken from the cottage walls, the fences around the sort, planter boxes, the boathouse, and the railing of the boathouse deck, the paint from Mark's shoes matched only one of those samples, the boathouse deck railing, meaning his shoe came in contact with the deck railing.
And then to really top their case off, police had remembered hearing from Lynn Duncan how Mark Unger seemed to know exactly where to go to find his wife's body despite it not being visible from where they were standing and not asking about her location and Lynn Duncan not having volunteered it.
Investigators placed a mannequin into the water at the location where Flo's body was found. And then, with a video camera, they recorded the exact journey Mark took from the spot he was standing when he first learned Flo had been found dead to the spot where Flo was found. And that video made it clear that Flo's body was not visible from any point on that path except at the very end.
The video documents the journey to the spot to where Flo was found and it makes clear that the body was not visible until one was right at the edge of the platform. So how had Mark ran straight to her? In interviewing people that Mark had contact with in the days and weeks following her death, police learned that Mark had told differing inconsistent stories about what had happened to Flo.
In one version, he told people he tucked his children into bed and when he returned to the deck, Flo wasn't there. In another version, he claimed he returned to the deck and Flo was fine, so he left her there and returned to the cottage to go to bed. Everything in this case was really pointing to murder. What authorities believed happened is they believed that Mark pushed Flo over the railing, causing those wounds on her stomach,
returned to the cabin to put his kids to bed, and when he returned to the boathouse, he was surprised to discover that Flo was still alive despite her fall. So he pushed her into the water to finish what he had begun.
Prosecutors had everything they needed at this point, and Mark Unger was arrested and charged with first degree premeditated murder. Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color treated hair, but Proz does. They have a formula that can address my specific type of hair needs, which makes sense because it's based on me. If you're wondering whether custom hair care is worth the hype, let me tell you it is, and that's why I'm obsessed with Proz.
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The case was big news in Michigan at the time, not least because Unger had had a minor following from when he was a radio sportscaster. So he was like a little bit of a celebrity. His lawyer held a press conference contending that the state had no case against his client, that there were no fingerprints, no confessions, and no eyewitnesses, as though those are the only elements to proving a case.
There was a minor snag in the pretrial process, though, concerning that disagreement about cause of death between the forensic pathologist that first examined Flo up in the county where she died and the medical examiner in Oakland County where she lived. Remember, the former ruled the cause of death as a head injury, while the latter concluded, no, no, no, she had drowned after entering the water unconscious, which
They both agreed that her death was not accidental though, but where they differed meant the difference between premeditated murder if Mark dumped Flo in the water while she was still alive and second degree murder assuming that Mark pushed Flo over the railing and she died from the fall. The district court ruled that the Oakland County Medical Examiner's opinion, for whatever reason, was to be excluded from testimony. So the charge was downgraded by the district court to second degree murder.
But then the circuit court ruled that the medical examiner's testimony was admissible and the charge was then upgraded again to first degree murder. All in all, it had taken nearly seven months for authorities to establish probable cause enough to arrest Mark Unger and it would then take two more years for the case to go to trial.
The trial began in April of 2006. Mark Unger did not testify in his own defense. His defense argued that Mark was passionately in love with Flo and would never lay a hand on her. They insisted that her death was a tragic accident and Flo had fallen over the railing, bounced upon landing, and rolled into the water, just like he had always said. They played the computer animations that had been created by Mark's hired forensic firm.
but the jury didn't buy it. On June 21st, 2006, the jury found Mark Unger guilty of first-degree murder. According to news reports, Unger showed no emotion when the verdict was read, which is something you hear often if you consume enough true crime. But yeah, Mark Unger remained expressionless as the verdict was read, but Flo's mother was in the courtroom and there was no holding back emotion for her. She said, "'Thank you, God,' as the verdict was read."
Mark's mother, on the other hand, was convinced of her son's innocence. "He would never hurt anyone," she told the press. "I think the world knows that, except for those people." I guess she means the jury, and the police, and the prosecutors, and Flo's family. Those people. Mark Unger was sentenced to life in prison, and during his statement at the sentencing hearing, Mark insisted he was innocent and had been wrongly accused.
i'm confident that our appeal will overturn this wrongful conviction he said i'm hoping i will one day be able to hold my children in my arms again which sadly for mark was not to be true he's filed multiple appeals since his conviction and all of them have been denied you know serial killer stories and stranger crimes are chilling maybe the most chilling kind of true crime stories there is
But you're far more likely to be murdered by someone you know than a stranger. And far more likely to be murdered by a spouse or a romantic partner than anyone else. Statistically speaking, every American has about a 1 in 200 chance of being murdered in their lifetime.
That's kind of a daunting statistic. But murders committed by serial killers represent less than 1% of all murders. So your chances of being murdered by a serial killer are roughly 1 in about 18,000. You're more likely to be hit by lightning than killed by a serial killer. However, you are far more likely to be murdered by someone you know than struck by a bolt from the blue.
That's why it's really important to know the person you're marrying as much as you can.
but I'm sure Florence thought she really knew Mark Unger when she married him. Sometimes you can never really truly know what a person is capable of until they're no longer trying to win your commitment. They've already got it, and circumstances unlock their worst fundamental character flaws. In the Forensic Files episode on this case, at the very end, Flo's father makes a very good point, which is,
When a woman is in the process of getting a divorce, she should avoid all contact with her estranged husband except that which is absolutely necessary and unavoidable. And even then, she should maybe think twice about it and only meet in public or with a witness present. Because in Flo's case, there had been zero known history of violence or abuse in the relationship. Nothing that would have precipitated or anticipated her husband killing her.
And whether he had planned to do it before he met with her on the boathouse that night, or whether it was only after he realized he was in deep trouble if Flo ever regained consciousness, it was still premeditated either way. And it left their two young sons robbed of both their parents. A tragedy all around.
That's it for this week. I'll be back again next Wednesday, as always, with a brand new case. So join me then, won't you? See ya!