by Jeff Rice
Of the blood-crazed monsters that have tracked their bloody prints through the pages of fiction, the vampires and werewolves are the best known. There is, however, a basic difference between the vampire and the werewolf. The werewolf changes from human into animal form. The vampire always remains “human.” The werewolf is almost exclusively a person who becomes one either voluntarily or through the bite of another werewolf. But in either case, he has never been dead. On the other hand, a vampire, who becomes such from the bite of another vampire but not the complete draining of his (or her) blood, first “dies” and is reborn into an “undead” state. And, with the exception of psychological paralysis induced by fear or by hypnotism, a person never becomes a vampire voluntarily.
Legend has it that St. Patrick himself once changed a Welsh king into a werewolf for reasons that are lost to modern historians. Although there are several versions of the modus operandi of werewolves, most authorities agree that they kill out of lust, not just the need to drink blood. They don’t need blood to survive. And, in many cases, they are totally unconscious of their animalistic acts. They are universally recognized as being unaccountably brutal. Moreover, the activities of werewolves are somewhat predictable as they are “activated” by the full moon. At other times they lead relatively normal lives thus supposedly making them harder to find and destroy. Various methods have been mentioned as being effective means of disposing of them. With the invention of firearms, the most popular device is a pistol or rifle loaded with silver bullets and aimed at the heart.
The vampire, however, is an altogether different proposition. He or she becomes a vampire involuntarily and dies only to arise each and every night to drink the blood necessary to maintain the human “body” in its “undead” state during daylight hours. (Interestingly enough, female vampires seem to dominate much of vampiric literature to the extent of giving rise to the once-popular slang expression “vampire” or “vamp,” indicating a female “bloodsucker” who literally drains men (sexually and financially) of their substance.).
At night the vampire is almost virtually omnipotent, fearing only, according to most accounts of the last two millennia, the sight of the cross, i.e., a crucifix. During the day, they lie dormant and are almost totally helpless. In this sleeping state they can be easily disposed of by hammering a stake made of wood through their “human” hearts and (according to some) cutting off their heads afterwards. They can also die if sprinkled heavily with Holy Water or if exposed for any length of time to the direct rays of the sun. The loss of their native soil, with which their “coffins” are lined, can cause them no end of misery, and, if they are far from home, will eventually lead to their wandering about in the daytime and dying. According to legend, the soul of the vampire cannot go to heaven (or hell) until the vampire’s body has been properly destroyed.
Virtually every culture in every section of the world has its vampire legends. The vampire’s genesis appears in the times of the ancient Hebrews who called her Lillith and even farther back in pre-Hebraic Babylon where she was known as Lilitu. The ancient Greeks called her Lamia and she had the upper torso and head of a woman and the lower half of a snake, wings, and flew through the night to suck the blood of children. (A variation of the winged-serpent concept may be found in the Quetzalcoatl of the ancient Aztecs.) The Romans called the vampire Strix. In plural it was Strigae which evolved into the modern Italian Strega for witch. Vampire legends have been recorded in great variety in India, Malaysia and Arabia. In the tales of the Arabian Nights there is the account of Sinbad the Sailor who encountered “one-eyed monsters” like Odysseus’ Cyclops, Polyphemus, but these one-eyed creatures roasted their victims before eating them. The Chinese, too, have vampire legends, all filled with blood and terror.
And, of course, there are the legends of Central Europe.
“Dracula,” it turns out, was indeed a real man. Actually, a whole line of “royalty” in the region known as Wallachia (now Rumania) existed in the 1400s. It seems that Vlad III of Wallachia, a sort of warlord, was elevated to the rank of Voivode (a “count” or local king) in the year 1431 by King Sigismund, later the Holy Roman Emperor. In becoming Voivode, Vlad automatically joined Sigismund’s Order of the Dragon, a special coterie of knights, and served as the head of Wallachia’s puppet government. Information about Vlad III mentions him as being extremely vicious and bloodthirsty. His subjects came to believe he was possessed of the devil and considered the dragon symbol on his tunic as a sign of this.
When the Turks conquered Wallachia in the 1450s they set up his son, Vlad IV, as their puppet ruler. He was even more cruel; so brutal in fact, that he became a legend in his own time. Vlad IV became the Hitler of his day. When he wasn’t impaling people on stakes (his favorite pastime from all accounts) he had his unlucky victims ground live into hamburger, chopped up in to “sausage” and literally “shot from guns.” The Encyclopaedia Britannica says he is reported to “have feasted amongst his impaled victims.” All reports of his activities make Nero look like a truant from a nursery school by comparison.
As talk of his bloodlust grew, and the connection between the dragon on his tunic and the talk of his allegiance with the devil spread, a new name was given to him stemming from the Hungarian word for dragon–Dracula! The word has its root in the Latin draco, and can be found in Italian as gradulia, and in German as trakle.
However, after years of his bloodletting, Voivode Vlad IV (Dracula) went too far and stuck a stake through an ambassador and his ruler, Sultan Majomet of Turkey, became so enraged at the news that he personally led the army that deposed Dracula and the “vampire” was thought to have died in exile. However Mahomet reckoned without Dracula’s powers of recuperation and Dracula returned in 1475 to reclaim his throne, giving further rise to the idea of a vampire returning from the dead. When Dracula was again deposed a year later, he died one final time.
Most of the legends built up in the general area of Hungary and Rumania finally congealed into the familiar version of the vampire as seen by author Bram Stoker in his famous Dracula of the 1890’s. This vampire is almost always a nobleman, tall, thin, pale, with red-rimmed eyes, a mouth full of fangs, blood-red lips and total power during the hours of darkness. Such a creature inevitably gives off a foul stench, particularly from his mouth. (That certainly fit our suspect.) He has the power to paralyze with fright, to create others of his kind by merely biting them, or by hypnotizing victims, unbitten, to create slaves.
Although I found this information very interesting, I still wondered whether I was on the right track. On the one hand, no one has ever scientifically proven vampires to be nonexistent. But then no one has ever gotten one in the lab to study.
Still, if the legends seem to some people too insubstantial to be believed, the factual cases from police files seem hardly less bloodthirsty and, in many cases, a whole lot more disgusting. While there is no account (among those we researched so hastily) of a documented case of any of those I will mention here as having fangs or a coffin for a resting place, the people I am about to list disposed of all manner of victims–small animals, men, women and children–often drinking their blood, or eating them, or selling pieces of their bodies as meatcutter’s products. Sometimes sex offenses were involved. The late Dr. Ernest Jones, of the Freudian school of psychiatry, felt the vampire belief contained portions of most sexual deviations but stemmed from infancy when the sex drive has not yet been centralized at the sexual organs and satisfaction is obtained largely through sucking and biting. He contended such people who acted like vampires were expressing sex drives of an infantile nature.
Sometimes witchcraft and Satan worship was involved. But always, blood was spilled in copious amounts.
“Jack the Ripper” is probably the most famous of the documented police cases. He is the archetypical fiend; the slayer of helpless women in the dead of night. While legends have grown up around this bloody figure to indicate he may have been responsible for as many as twenty vicious slayings
in as many years, the police reports and newspaper accounts of the day would put the more likely number at seven, all dying in the year 1888.
London also had a “vampire” appear shortly after World War II in South Kensington. He was a mild-looking man named John George Haigh, and before he was through on February 18, 1949, he had shot a Mrs. Durand-Deacon with a .38, sliced open her neck, filled a drinking glass with her blood, downed it and dumped her body in a tank filled with thirty gallons of sulphuric acid. Afterward, according to his own testimony, he went out to tea. He also took her jewelry which he pawned and which led the police to arrest him, at which time he admitted his crime saying, “No trace of her can ever be found. I did the same with the Hendersons and the McSwans.”
Without going into lengthy detail, let it be enough to say that the police amassed enough evidence to have Haigh hanged because according to British law, he could not plead insanity as long as he knew the nature and quality of his deed. He admitted that he did know, and that he had gained financially as a result of his murderous activities. The rope finished him as surely as a stake through the heart.
In Hanover, Germany, in 1925, Fritz Haarmann went on trial for his life and before it was over, the one-time soldier and ex-police stooge admitted to killing between thirty and forty victims, mostly teen-aged boys whom he raped and while doing so, tore out their throats with his teeth. His death at the hands of a sword-wielding executioner was well within the bounds of tradition in the disposal of vampires. His head was cut off.
And then there was the infamous Peter Kurten, known variously as “The Dusseldorf Vampire” and “The Dusseldorf Child Killer.” Kurten was basically a sneak thief and petty burglar who got his sexual release from murdering young children, especially girls, by strangulation or by the knife, often drinking their blood. He started as a child on small animals like squirrels after he discovered he felt intense pleasure when he saw animals slaughtered. Soon he graduated to bigger game, killing two of his male playmates at age nine by pushing them off a raft into the Rhine River and holding them under until they drowned.
The greatest sexual thrill of his early life was an unsuccessful strangling attempt on a young girl. After his bungling of the job in the Grafenburg Woods, he followed her for days until he was arrested and sent to prison for four years. He had been active from 1889 until 1908. After his release and until May of 1930, he killed no less than twenty-three times!
He was fascinated by the act of stabbing and could achieve an orgasm only when engaged in the act. He once stabbed a child he had already strangled to death–stabbed her 36 times. He was even more fascinated by dripping or spurting blood and would often drink it. Yet he was described as “fastidious,” a very clean man who was so careful in his crimes that laboratory analysis of his clothing was necessary to detect evidence of his handiwork. And he was “a good Catholic” who said his prayers regularly and thought abortion a “sin.”
While awaiting execution he received many letters from women confessing their love for him and their desire for marriage. (While on trial for the Sharon Tate killings Charles Manson also received such letters.)
Like Haarmann, he was executed by beheading. And, in 1931, in a slightly disguised version of his “career,” Kurten was resurrected by film director Fritz Lang in the movie classic, M starring a little-known Hungarian Jew named Peter Lorre, one of the original vampires of Brecht and Weill’s The Three Penny Opera.
In the Paris of 1847-48, a large number of corpses, particularly those of young woman, were either stolen or dug up and mutilated on the spot by human teeth.
The teeth belonged to a demented army sergeant named Bertrand, who, when caught, confessed to the overwhelming desire to mutilate and devour corpses, chewing their flesh and entrails and then, according to some accounts, when covered with gore, rending and mutilating his handiwork. Before he was captured he managed to have sexual intercourse with at least one, mutilated, partially eaten body. He spent a year in jail and disappeared after his release.
There have been numerous jokes about the butcher who served up his victims as “choice cuts” to his morning customers. This, too, can be traced to actual fact. Between 1921 and 1924, some thirty persons disappeared without a trace in Munsterberg, Silesia, Germany, Eventually, the trail led to Herr Denke, a quiet religious man who pumped the bellows for the organ in the local church. In a time of general starvation and unbelievable inflation, when twelve-million German marks (often carted in wheelbarrows) might buy a loaf of stale, moldy bread, people were not at all adverse to chopping up horses, cats and dogs to survive. Denke went one step further to insure a steady supply of meat on the table. He chopped up thirty of his neighbors. After his arrest he decided not to await a trial and quietly hanged himself in his cell.
In the same vein was George Grossman of Berlin who was also slaughtered some of his acquaintances, specializing, like the “ripper,” in prostitutes. But unlike Denke, he kept his victim’s bodies around for decorations. He was noisy and his landlord decided one day to evict him. When the landlord forced open his door he discovered a nicely trussed-up corpse of a young girl, still warm, and a variety of fingers under Grossman’s bed which it is said he nibbled on for “midnight snacks.” He was credited with at least three murders in as many weeks and, like Denke, hanged himself in his cell before the executioner could swing his blade.
Cold-blooded killings in the present era include the tale of Perry Smith and Eugene Hickock who disposed of all four members of the Herber Clutter family in the lonely, windswept Kansas farmhouse where they resided on November 15, 1959. Their deeds were “immortalized” aptly enough in “In Cold Blood,” Truman Capote’s book.
Far worse than these two were an atypical British pair named Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who between them were credited with molesting, mutilating and then killing Edward Evans, seventeen, Lesley Ann Downey, ten, and John Kilbride, twelve, and possibly two more. In one instance, they took pornographic pictures of their victim, forcing her to pose “indecently and in every conceivable manner.” In another, they tape-recorded their victim’s final pitiable screams of fear and agony. Since this happened after capital punishment had been abolished in Great Britain, Brady and Hindley are now behind bars for life with no chance of parole.
The latest of these ghoulish escapades is, of course, the Sharon Tate killings, which involved five victims and included stabbing, shooting and strangulation by hanging. Miss Tate, a movie star and wife of film director Roman Polanski (himself famous for bloody and frightening films), was eight months pregnant when she died and she died slowly, pleading for the baby’s life. She was strangled, hung and stabbed countless times. Her baby died, untouched by the knife, still in her womb. It has been reported by at least one “eyewitness” at the trial (in progress at this writing) that some of the group led in absentia by Charles Manson “drank Sharon Tate’s blood” and found “it was groovy!” This last remark harks all the way back to 1888 when Jack the Ripper claimed in a note that he ate a victim’s “fried” kidney and found it “very nice.”
I was sure that when I presented these facts to the local law officials they would take me seriously when I suggested that the man they were looking for would not only conform to the general modus operandi of a vampire because he actually believed he was one, but that he would have to be stopped even if it meant telling the public the true facts because he might well be capable of worse crimes.
The more I read of the legends the more I was reminded of the old adage, “an ounce of prevention….” Etc. I decided that, just to be sure, the police should approach this problem as if this man were in fact a vampire and protect and prepare themselves accordingly.
How they actually received this suggestion and its result will be found in later pages. One thing for sure. The public never heard a word about it, testifying not only to the chicanery of the police, but to the lack of courage of the local news media. The papers of London, Berlin and Paris weren’t afraid to print the truth. But th
en, maybe what some people have said about Vegas is true: that Las Vegas isn’t really part of the real world and that once inside its boundaries, none of the normal rules apply.
Decide for yourself.
CHAPTER 11
[Once again, in order to fill in blank spots in Kolchak’s notes, I have had to compile the facts and reach what appears to be logical conclusions based on these facts. JR]
All through the weekend, while Kolchak pored over his books trying to find a sound basis in fact and fancy for his “vampire theory,” the unexpected meeting of Henri St. Claire and the tall man (still unknown to Kolchak) kept gnawing like a hungry rat at St. Claire’s memory. It distracted him. It spoiled his appetite. It gave him two sleepless nights. And it gave the tall man an opportunity to kill Mr. Hemphill and get away without a trace. Had St. Claire read the papers upon his return from Europe, he doubtless would have called the police when he spotted him in the Dunes. As it was, he only saw some back issues of the Daily News on his desk when he entered his office on Monday and these he did not read until late afternoon.
At first he couldn’t believe his eyes. He now remembered who the man was.
Janos Skorzeny!
Slowly the memories came back to him. Bucharest and Paris just before World War II. And London during the blitz. Skorzeny, a man who had moved like a ghost and with no one knowing much about him but everyone convinced he was… odd, and for some unknown reason, strange and possibly dangerous. Why the man hardly seemed a day older than he’d been in 1939!
