# EP7 - 5 Strange Cases Involving Scientists and Defense Employees

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-scarecast-scary-stories-mysteries-and-true-crime-432528/ep7-5-strange-cases-involving-scientists-and-defense-employees
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-scarecast-scary-stories-mysteries-and-true-crime-432528/ep7-5-strange-cases-involving-scientists-and-defense-employees.md
Podcast: [The Scarecast: Scary Stories, Mysteries, and True Crime](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-scarecast-scary-stories-mysteries-and-true-crime-432528)
Published: 2026-04-04T00:53:25+00:00
Episode link: https://redcircle.com/shows/1a5a2b50-ba56-48fc-a05b-ce2a55cac801/episodes/ae8d5494-7502-41bc-a996-d0ca54739aeb
Audio file: https://audio2.redcircle.com/episodes/ae8d5494-7502-41bc-a996-d0ca54739aeb/stream.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-scarecast-scary-stories-mysteries-and-true-crime-432528/episodes/ep7-5-strange-cases-involving-scientists-and-defense-employees
Duration seconds: 2684

## Resource

n this episode, we follow a chilling pattern that no official agency has ever laid out in one place: a nine‑month window where scientists, analysts, and officers tied to America’s air and space power either vanished or had their lives ended violently, while the official narratives stayed fragmented and strangely incomplete. We start by going much deeper into the disappearance of rocket‑alloy pioneer Monica Jacinto Reza, whose work on the Mondaloy superalloy helped the U.S. break its dependence on Russian RD‑180 rocket engines, and who walked into the Angeles National Forest on a familiar trail in June 2025 and simply never came back. From the scrubbed “green burial” memorial and missing cell‑phone forensics, to a mysterious hiking companion known only as Subject A. Then we move to New Mexico, where Los Alamos employee and DOE advisory board member Melissa Casias returns home in the middle of the day, only for her family to later find both her personal and government LANL phones apparently wiped back to factory state on the very day she vanishes along Route 518. At Wright‑Patterson Air Force Base, we revisit the brutal triple incident involving AFRL project manager Jacob Prichard, finance specialist Jaymee Prichard, and top‑secret‑cleared analyst 1st Lt. Jaime Gustitus — a so‑called “domestic” case that still has no publicly stated motive and is being driven not by local homicide but by Air Force counterintelligence investigators. We also examine the murder of fusion physicist Nuno F.G. Loureiro outside Boston, targeted by a heavily prepared gunman who also carried out a mass shooting at Brown University after years of quiet planning, burner phones, and a pre‑staged storage unit in another state. Finally, we look at the murder of Caltech astrophysicist and NEO Surveyor…

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## Transcript

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