A death investigation and missing person case has been unfolding in Georgia that’s unlike anything local authorities have ever seen, with cops spending nearly a month looking for the fiance of a Spelman College instructor who was found dead and floating in a lake, along with her partner’s boat and shoes. The U.S. Secret Service has even been called in to assist, according to officials.

“There’s never been anybody looked for like this,” Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills told local Fox affiliate WAGA this week as police entered day 22 of looking for Gary Jones, husband of Joycelyn Wilson, at Lake Oconee — the last place they were seen alive together — in what officials have dubbed the largest search effort in county history.

Jones, who is believed to be dead, was boating with Wilson on Feb. 8 when they disappeared sometime that evening. His boat was found circling a portion of Lake Oconee with no one on board, roughly seven miles away from where he and Wilson were caught on video at a boat launch. Cops say they can be seen putting the vessel into the water together. Witness testimony and phone records show that whatever happened with the couple unfolded between 5:01 p.m. and 5:24 p.m., according to Sills.

“This is a huge area,” he told Fox and ABC affiliate WGXA last week. “Not to mention the cold weather and the cold water preventing normal surfacing. There is a Herculean effort going on here trying to locate his body.”

Six people who have been missing for nearly six months, including two 3-year-old children, have prompted police to sound the alarm about a suspected online cult that they allege is operated by a man currently serving 18 years in prison for child molestation.

Rashad Jamal, also known as Rashad Jamal White, is a self-professed online “prophet” who runs a YouTube channel where he describes himself as the leader of the “University of Cosmic Intelligence.” Less advertised on his own website is his conviction on a single count of child molestation and another count of cruelty toward a child last August, Law&Crime previously reported.

Despite the fact that Jamal is behind bars, police in Missouri are now spreading the word investigators believe that in the time since Jamal was sentenced, four adults who started following him online have cut ties with their loved ones, quit their jobs and otherwise gone rogue after being lured into Jamal’s bizarre web of conspiracy theories.

In videos reviewed by Law&Crime’s Sierra Gillespie last week, Jamal is seen in one post proclaiming that “winter is not real” and that it is actually “a weapon” with the “true name of sub-zero technology.”

Nearly 13 years after cops found a woman without her head or thumbs and with her blood drained from her body, they now know her name.

The Kern County Sheriff’s Office last week said it identified the woman found dead in a grape vineyard in Arvin, California, on March 29, 2011, as 64-year-old Ada Beth Kaplan. The scene that day in Arvin, which is about 30 miles south of Bakersfield, was brutal. In addition to having her head and thumbs chopped off, the woman now known as Kaplan also was nude and placed in a prone position that investigators considered sexual.

Detectives believe she was killed elsewhere and carefully placed in the vineyard. Coroners categorized the death as a homicide but could not determine the cause of death.

Ray Pruitt, then an investigator with Kern County Sheriff’s Department, described the scene as “surreal” in a 2018 interview with NBC affiliate KGET.

“I remember looking at the detectives and the sergeant on scene and the coroner investigator who had arrived on the scene and we were all kind of speechless,” Pruitt said. “We were all just looking at each other trying to get our minds around what we were looking at.”

Pruitt said the murder was one “that you come across maybe once in an entire career, maybe never.”