Decades-old Unsolved Mysteries case is about to be solved, says producer

Terry Dunn Meurer said the team had been working with a detective for a 30-year-old case in Idaho, aired on the original series, "that's probably going to get solved in the next month or two".

Speaking to Variety, Meurer said, "There was a young man who committed suicide in a church in Idaho. He’s a John Doe — he’s been a John Doe for 30 years. And the investigator in this police department of relatively new investigators decided he wanted to try and solve this case.

"My understanding is he went to the file, which was in a box, and the only thing that was in the box — the only information in the box — was a VHS copy of Unsolved Mysteries. He reached out to us and said, 'Do you have anything? Do you have the note this man left behind? Do you have any of the details from the case?'

"And we actually had it, which was surprising to me after all these years. We gave him the information we had, and this investigator has been working on it. He just recently, in the last couple of weeks, reached out and said, 'I think that we might have figured out who this man is.'"

Since the revived series launched earlier this month, Meurer said the team behind Unsolved Mysteries have been inundated with tips from viewers, although he admits that the reliability of them varies significantly.

"There’s probably around 2,000 tips and comments at this point [on unsolved.com] but not all of those are credible leads. Somebody asked me, 'How many credible leads have you gotten?' I don’t have an answer for that because I don’t know. We pass the leads if there’s law enforcement involved."

He added, "There’s just no way to quantify how many credible leads there are. But a lot has come in. It’s been very active."

A further batch of episodes for the show is expected to air later this year, with Meurer claiming the next series has already been shot, edited and delivered, and teasing that the new cases will include a ghost story.

Unsolved Mysteries is available to stream on Netflix. Check out our lists of the best series on Netflix and the best movies on Netflix, or see what else is on with our TV guide.