December 3rd, 2003.

Baltimore, Maryland.

While working on a plea agreement,

38-year-old prosecutor Jonathan Luna leaves his office at the federal courthouse shortly before midnight.

The following morning, Luna's vehicle is discovered over 90 miles away in a creek in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,

and his body is lying in the water.

He has been stabbed 36 times with his own pen knife, but surprisingly, the FBI leaned toward his death being a suicide.

However, a check of Luna's movements that night showed that he made an unexplained detour through Delaware

before you wound up in Lancaster County, and the local coroner's office continues to insist that he was murdered.

After that, the trail went cold.

Welcome to the latest episode of The Trail Went Cold.

I'm your host Robin Warner, and today we're going to be covering one of the more baffling cases I've ever featured on this podcast.

The unexplained 2005 death of Jonathan Luna.

This is the story of a federal prosecutor who drove away from his office late one night.

It was found dead the following morning in an entirely different state under very bizarre circumstances.

Some of the strangest mysteries I've ever encountered are those in which the victim makes a lengthy unexplained trip to a location they have no reason to be at before they wind up dead.

As examples, I've previously done episodes on the mysterious deaths of Judy Smith, who vanished during a business trip to Philadelphia before her remains were found on a North Carolina mountain months later,

and Blair Adams, who made a cross-country trip from British Columbia to Knoxville, Tennessee before he was killed by an unknown assailant.

The death of Jonathan Luna is particularly odd, not only because he inexplicably traveled from Baltimore to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,

but because he also drove hundreds of miles out of his way in the opposite direction to travel through Delaware, and no one has any idea why.

Not only that, but there has been a dispute between different law enforcement agencies about whether Luna's death was murder or suicide,

even though stabbing yourself 36 times with your own pen knife seems like a very unlikely way to kill yourself.

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