I'm the co-creator and executive producer

of Unsolved Mysteries.

And I'm going to share with you how we find

the stories that we produce for the series.

(Unsolved Mysteries theme music)

There's a lot of different ways that stories come to us.

We have story submissions that come in

from viewers who watch the episodes.

And we have a team that goes through

all of those submissions to try and find

the strongest mysteries and the most viable mysteries.

We have had hundreds and hundreds of stories

submitted to us.

And as the executive producer of the show,

probably the most challenging part of my job

is the story selection,

and which stories are we going to tell.

When we begin a season of Unsolved Mysteries,

we usually have all the stories chosen

before we start production.

We want to always make sure that we have

a variety of different kinds of mysteries.

So a murder, a wanted,

a missing persons case, an unexplained death,

and a paranormal case.

Because we feel like that the viewers

want a variety of mysteries.

And everybody isn't interested in exactly the same mystery.

We look for a combination of stories,

international and domestic both.

We look for rural and urban.

We look for diversity in race, and in culture,

and in ethnicity, and age.

Volume two we have a case of

the Washington insider John Wheeler

who's very high profile in Washington D.C.

And we also have missing children from a park in Harlem.

We want the audience to feel like they're looking at

a variety of different people from all walks of life.

In volume one,

the story of Lena Chapin,

it's the missing witness episode,

that story came to us through Lena's sister Brandi,

who reached out to us and wanted us to do her story.

- I miss her.

I miss her so much it kills me.

- We get story submissions from law enforcement too

because they know that by getting their case

on Unsolved Mysteries, there's a really good chance

that it will get solved.

Lester Eubanks is an example of that,

the case of death row fugitive which is in volume two.

The US Marshals reached out to us

and asked us if we would do that story.

At the Unsolved Mysteries offices,

we have what we kind of call a war room.

It's basically a conference room

that is surrounded by cork board, by bulletin board.

And we put all the stories that are contenders

up on that board and we just kind of move them around

and try and figure out what the best

combination of stories would be.

The twists and turns and the questions

that we ask in our story meeting,

we know are questions that the audience is going to ask.

And so when we all start engaging

in a conversation about a story,

we know that the audience will as well.

When we choose a story,

it's important to us that all the people

involved in the story want the story to be told

and want to participate.

So we do respect people who prefer not to have

that publicity and that notoriety.

There are a lot of people who just

have lived with the pain, and the tragedy,

and the loss for so long.

It is very hard for them to talk about it again

and to have all the publicity and to have their hopes

raised again because they're afraid

that the case still won't be solved.

After we find an Unsolved Mysteries story

that we feel would make a strong episode,

we go out and scout the story.

We meet the people

who we are going to interview in the story.

We look at the locations and we just make sure

that all the pieces are going to come together.

We always shoot all the episodes on location

because we feel like that gives it

an authenticity that we wouldn't get

if we just shot everything in one location.

So scouting the stories is very important.

We come back, we write up a rough outline

of how that story would go together,

and then we put that into production.

We always have a lot of footage,

a lot of interview material especially to go through.

And we don't have a narrator anymore

as we did with the original episodes with Robert Stack.

So the interviewees themselves

are the ones that are telling the stories.

We've done a lot of mysteries.

Over the years we've done over 1,300 cases.

A lot of people will say,

oh, these stories are so sad, and they're so tragic,

and how do you do this after all these years?

And I think the thing that keeps us going

is the hope that we can solve these mysteries.

That's why we do what we do.

This is often the court of last resort.

Their cases have gone cold

and there's not a lot of attention on these cases.

And we come in and we shine a light on those cases

and see if we can reinvigorate the investigation

and bring in some more leads.

That's how we choose stories here at Unsolved Mysteries.

So check out volume two now streaming on Netflix.