Best of YouTube: real-life crime solvers

This is one genre of YouTube truly making a difference and providing closure to families of missing loved ones and helping solve cold cases.

One of my favourite channels is Adventures with Purpose. These guys are skilled divers who travel the country helping search waterways for missing vehicles and missing people.

They use a small inflatable boat equipped with sonar equipment and are highly experienced in water searches.

They are deserving of the close to 2,000,000 subscribers they have at the time of writing, having found over ten missing persons. Although they are sadly finding these people deceased, the families at least get to know what happened to their loved ones, sometimes having spent decades not knowing.

Take for instance the case Carey Mae Parker who went missing thirty years ago with her young daughter while on the way to her son's birthday party. Her sister and remaining children have spent the last three decades know knowing why and where she disappeared to. Adventures with Purpose came to help and within a day or two of searching, located the car underwater and assisted police in recovering the vehicle.

Due to the long time the car had been underwater, it fell apart while being pulled out of the water and the police dive crew subsequently brought in to search for any human remains botched the job and failed to find any. Adventures with Purpose stepped in again and found remains of Carey Mae and her daughter plus a present that she was taking for her son.

Their 'Solved' playlist has many other amazing examples of emotional searches and recoveries.

There are several other similar channels that often team up for searches. Chaos Divers and Exploring with Nug are two other examples.

HeavyDSparks is another channel and the hosts will be well-known to those familiar with the TV series Diesel Brothers.

Although this channel is more of a vehicle and adventure channel, they recently conducted a major search of a mine shaft where a body of a missing woman was suspected of being located.

Over three videos (first video), they undertook a very challenging search of the mineshaft that had been filled with lots of debris including a burnt wooden structure and dirt that was piled metres high.

They spent more than a week searching, removing a large amount of wood and digging out tonnes of dirt by hand, and (spoiler alert) they did end up finding bones that are yet to be identified.

Channels like that use a significant proportion of their YouTube income to undertake these searches where the police are either unwilling to undertake or have proved incapable are well worth supporting.