Despite the Governor’s constant reassurances, children were indeed disappearing and dying – not at the hands of a vampire or a sinister horsemen, but of someone all too real and far, far worse. Her name was Enriqueta Ripollés and she was not only a child snatcher and peddler of children to adults for sex but also a real-life witch, who, once finished with her helpless victims, literally boiled their bones in a cauldron and made potions out of their blood and fat.
Enriqueta Ripollés had tried her hand at various professions over the years. She was a domestic servant girl at 15, had become a prostitute by the time she was 20 and was madam of a child brothel when she was 32. When the brothel was raided in 1909, she was arrested and sent to jail for four years, after which she went straight for a while, opening an antique shop in 1914, and living above the premises with her partner, a failed artist. But the enterprise soon collapsed and she broke up with her lover shortly afterwards. So, instead of opening another child brothel and risking another police raid, she hit upon another idea. This time she decided that she would provide a door-to-door service to the sick and depraved clientele she had acquired through her many years working in the child sex trade.
In the mornings, she would dress up as a beggar, disguise the children she had kidnapped in rags and take them into the city centre to help her beg for money. In the afternoons, she would bring the children to the more affluent parts of town and sell them for sex to her old and trusted customers. She soon had a lucrative and exclusive list of clients and had also hit upon another profitable sideline: mysterious potions, which she claimed could cure impotence and old age.
To acquire the ingredients for her concoctions, Ripollés dismembered her victims, drained them of their blood, boiled away their flesh and even crushed their bones. Her rich clients, knowing full well what was in them, snapped them up.
Police finally became suspicious of Ripollés when a neighbour noticed a child peering forlornly from the window of an apartment across the road and contacted the local police station. For three weeks, police had been on the lookout for five-year-old Teresa Guitart, who had vanished from the street outside her house in February 1912, and the disappearance had made headlines the city over. When police knocked on her door, a little girl answered and told them that her ‘mother’ was not in. The girl’s head had been shaved and she said that her name was Felicidad (Happiness) but when gently questioned by police it was clear to the authorities that this was indeed the missing girl and that she had been instructed to call the owner of the apartment ‘mother’. There was another little girl in the house too. She was called Angelina, a variant of her real name – Angela.
When police went to interview the neighbours, they told them that they had often seen a little boy called Pepito with Ripollés only recently, but now he was nowhere to be seen. As police soon learned when they talked to the girls, Pepito was in fact dead and Felicidad and Angelina were both extremely lucky to be alive. Their account of their ordeal at the hands of Ripollés, especially that of five-year-old Angela, sounded like a sick version of Hansel and Gretel. Unfortunately, as police soon discovered, it was all too true.
Before Teresa had arrived, Angela had had another playmate: a six-year-old called Pepito. One day, Angela told police, Ripollés had picked him up, put him on a table and calmly stabbed him to death. She had then forced Angela to eat some of his cooked remains. On searching the witch’s lair, police found a bag of laundry at the bottom of which was a pile of charred children’s bones. In the kitchen they found another sack containing a large knife and a bloody pile of boy’s clothes, confirming Angela’s story. And the more police searched, the worse it got.
In a locked room, they found more than fifty vials containing blood and the fat from children’s bodies, along with ancient books containing mysterious recipes. Evidence that Ripollés had indeed been doing a brisk business came in the form of a luxurious room completely out of keeping with the rest of the house. It was decorated with rich fabrics and furniture and contained cupboards full of expensive women’s clothing and jewellery. They found several sets of silken children’s clothes too and also, legend has it, a cage with two dead children locked inside it.
The method Ripollés employed to kill children was revealed during her sensational murder trial, which saw headlines all over Spain baying for her prompt execution. One witness came forward and positively identified Ripollés as the woman who had stolen her child back in 1905. According to her testimony, she had originally come from the nearby village of Alcañiz to look for employment. One day she was standing in a cold doorway in Barcelona with her baby in her arms when Ripollés approached her, asked her if her baby needed milk and then offered to buy some. The woman gratefully accompanied her to a shop, where Ripollés bought her milk. Having gained the woman’s trust, Ripollés then offered to buy the baby bread and took the infant in her arms, saying she was going with her to the local bakery and would return shortly. The woman never saw her baby again.
Police were ordered to search all of Ripollés’s previous lodgings and there they found children’s bones under floorboards, as well as a bundle of tiny hands and wigs made of children’s hair. When their stomach-turning investigation was complete, horrified police estimated that Ripollés had murdered and made potions out of at least ten children over a ten-year period.
While in prison and awaiting trial, Ripollés tried unsuccessfully to kill herself by cutting her wrists. In the end, her fellow inmates did the job for her. Before she could be sentenced, she was beaten to death while she was exercising in the prison courtyard.
THE VIRGIN AND THE MADWOMAN: LEONARDA CIANCIULLI
A gypsy fortune teller once told witch Leonarda Cianciulli that all of her three sons would die young and that she herself would end up dead and deranged in a madhouse. World War II was fast approaching and as the conflict drew closer Cianciulli became increasingly convinced that the fortune teller was right and that her sons would all meet violent deaths on the battlefield.
At a young age, she had married an impoverished government clerk called Raffaele Pansardi. From the outset, their marriage had been marred by misfortune and tragedy. Cianciulli had given birth to 14 children, but only four of them had survived: three boys and one girl. In 1930, their home and all of their meagre possessions had been destroyed in a single afternoon by an earthquake. The couple had been forced to move and had been living in the impoverished village of Correggio in the Po valley ever since. There, in order to help supplement her husband’s small pay, Cianciulli made soap and candles and read tarot cards to the locals. She soon earned a reputation as a matchmaker and an expert in the affairs of the heart.
When, in the summer of 1940, Cianciulli got the news that her favourite son, Giuseppe, had been drafted into the army, she became convinced that the gypsy’s prophecy was about to come true. One night, shortly before Giuseppe was scheduled to present himself at the nearby army barracks for training, Cianciulli had a vivid dream in which the Virgin Mary came to her and told her that she would spare the lives of her sons but required three human sacrifices in return. The next day, without any hesitation at all, Cianciulli went to work.
She told three of the older women in the village that she had found a suitable husband for each one of them. Even better still, each husband lived far away from the confines of Correggio and all were in a position to offer the women happy, comfortable lives. The women would, of course, have to pay for the service rendered by the matchmaker and it would be better also, so as not to cause any fuss, to keep it all a secret until they had left the village and had established themselves in their new lives. So that their relatives would not worry about them in the meantime, Cianciulli persuaded all three women to write letters to their families, telling them that they had found happiness elsewhere. She promised that she would pass the letters on later.
When everything had been arranged and the women came to her house to pay her, Cianciulli drugged them and murdered them with an axe before turning their bo
dies into soap and cakes. Both products were big hits with the neighbours.
Fifty-year-old Faustina Setti was the first to end up in one of Correggio’s pots, having just handed her 30,000 lire for the privilege. Correggio drugged her wine and then cut her up into nine pieces with an axe. She then dropped the victim’s flesh and bones into the large cauldrons she used for making soap and boiled the mixture for 24 hours straight.
‘I threw the pieces into a pot,’ Cianciulli later testified at her trial, ‘added seven kilos of caustic soda, which I had bought to make soap, and stirred the whole mixture until the pieces dissolved in a thick, dark mush that I poured into several buckets and emptied in a nearby septic tank. As for the blood in the basin, I waited until it had coagulated, dried it in the oven, ground it and mixed it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk and eggs, as well as a bit of margarine, kneading all the ingredients together. I made lots of crunchy tea cakes and served them to the ladies who came to visit, though Giuseppe and I also ate them.’
Her second victim was 53-year-old Francesca Soavi; her third and last victim was a 60-year-old widow called Virginia Cacioppo: ‘She ended up in the pot, like the other two,’ Cianciulli later remembered, happily. ‘Her flesh was fat and white; when it had melted, I added a bottle of cologne, and after a long time on the boil I was able to make some most acceptable creamy soap. I gave bars to neighbours and acquaintances. The cakes, too, were better: that woman was really sweet.’
But Virginia Cacioppo’s sister became suspicious when Virginia disappeared after her visit to Cianciulli and contacted the police. Now that her work was over, Cianciulli immediately confessed to the three murders. She was sent to the madhouse in Pozzuoli, where she died 30 years later – fulfilling part of the prophecy made to her by the fortune teller.
A COTSWOLD KILLING: CHARLES WALTON
On Valentine’s Day 1945, the body of 74-year-old farm labourer Charles Walton was found lying face up under a willow tree on the lower slopes of Meon Hill in the Cotswolds. A pitchfork had been driven through his body with such force that it took two policemen to pull it out. His throat had been slashed with his own trouncing fork and a cross had been slashed on his chest.
In one of the largest investigations in police history, every inch of the field was searched and every one of the inhabitants of the nearby village of Lower Quinton was interviewed – to no avail. In fact, the local population seemed peculiarly reluctant to talk. All police could uncover were strange coincidences and whispered rumours of witchery.
Since well before Tudor times, the local Rollright Stones have been a meeting spot for witches; Walton himself was rumoured to be a high-ranking member of one of the many witches’ covens said to be operating in the area. Locals believed that he had the power to control animals, that he was clairvoyant and that he could also call and direct small animals at will. Police also learned that Walton had a rather sinister hobby: raising natterjack toads, which he was said to have harnessed at night to blight the crops.
Walton’s rumoured clairvoyance stemmed from a very old story about a black dog that had been recorded 80 years earlier by a local priest and amateur local historian. In the tale, an eight-year-old apprentice called Charles Walton had seen something called a ‘shuck’ on eight successive nights; according to local rumour, a ‘shuck’ comes in the form of a large black dog and its presence signifies impending tragedy. On the eighth night, the boy had heard the rustling of a silken dress and when he turned around he had seen a headless woman. He was later informed that his eight-year-old sister had been tragically killed.
The silence around the death of Charles Walton only deepened when one of the detectives in the case said he had seen a black dog on Meon Hill. Later that same day, a black dog was found dead, hung from a tree in close proximity to where Walton’s body had been found.
Police also discovered that Walton was not the first supposed witch to die in such a gruesome manner. Almost exactly a hundred years before his death, a mentally backwards stable boy had murdered a so-called witch in almost exactly the same way. When the boy was asked why he had killed her, he replied that he had done so to lift a curse that she had cast upon that year’s crop.
The area had seen other, related incidents over the years. In 1912, a farm hand in neighbouring Shipston on Stour had killed an 80-year-old woman with a pitchfork, claiming at his trial that she had bewitched him. There was even a name for the manner in which Walton had been killed: ‘sticking’, a way to kill a witch while preventing them from rising from the grave and seeking vengeance. So had Walton been murdered in this way as self-defence against a curse or as retaliation for a supposed hex upon the land?
The idea of witchcraft led to yet another bizarre theory. According to the old Julian calendar, in use until the Middle Ages, today’s 14 February had fallen on 2 February, which, according to local superstition, was traditionally the best day for a blood sacrifice. Walton had been thrown to the ground and the fork had then been driven in at an angle – possibly to allow his blood to flow into the earth.
The absence of Walton’s pocket watch, which he was said to carry with him wherever he went, made for another possible clue. Believing it might provide a link to the killer, police searched widely for it, without any luck. Inside the watch, Walton was said to keep a witch’s glass – an instrument that would protect him from spells and enchantments. Although it remained undiscovered at the time, the watch was unearthed 20 years later by a builder when he was remodelling Walton’s old cottage. The piece of glass that Walton kept inside it was missing.
The case remains unsolved to this day and the locals are still extremely reluctant to talk about it. While looking for Charles Walton’s grave, I asked one of the locals if there was any talk in the village today about who actually killed him. I was warned politely but firmly to mind my own damn business.
CASTLE OF BLOOD: ELIZABETH BATHORY
When Elizabeth Bathory was seven, she sneaked away from her nanny to witness the execution of a gypsy who, in one of the most appalling deaths known to man, was sewn up alive inside a dead horse. Such demented conduct was not uncommon in the 16th century, when the Hungarian nobility murdered and tortured the peasant population almost at will. That said, being a servant girl in the household the adult Bathory later controlled would turn out to be just about the worst job you could get.
Bathory had pale, almost translucent skin, and was of noble birth, hailing from one of the richest and most powerful families of Eastern Europe. Well educated and fluent in three languages, she was also (probably due to hundreds of years of intermarriage) hideously psychotic. At the age of 15, she was married off to a nobleman named Ferenc Nadasdy and moved to Cachtice Castle. Three years after her marriage, her husband was appointed Chief Commander of the Hungarian army and was from then on almost permanently absent warring and whoring, making a great name for himself against the Turks. Left to her own devices, Bathory soon started torturing servant girls, dabbling in witchcraft and, witnesses at her trial insisted, having regular sex with the devil.
The first official complaint against her reached the royal court in Vienna in 1602, when Lutheran parish priest Istvan Magyari raised concerns about the atrocities Bathory was allegedly carrying out on the local population. The authorities were slow to react, though – these were just peasants, after all – and it wasn’t until another eight years had passed that they actually sent an official team down to investigate further. In the meantime, Bathory’s husband died after being stabbed by a prostitute in Bucharest when he refused to pay her.
Under the guidance of witch Ilona Joo, witches, wizards, sorcerers, alchemists and devil worshippers found a warm welcome in Bathory’s castle and she soon started paying regular visits to her aunt, another witch and also rumoured to be a lesbian. She received further instruction from an old maid and sadist named called Dorka, a ‘forest witch’ well versed in the ways of witchcraft and black magic.
Bathory whiled away the lonely hours in the castle by shovin
g needles into the nails of young girls and then cutting off their fingers with red-hot shears. If the maids were caught gossiping she would sew their mouths firmly shut and if the ironing wasn’t quite up to scratch she was known to shove a red-hot iron down the offender’s throat. When feeling a bit down and too tired to get out of bed, she was known to call upon a servant, grab them and bite them in the face. According to some accounts, one winter she poured water over a domestic helper and then let the victim freeze to death outside. But most of her victims (and they may number six hundred) were beaten to death.
During one characteristic attack on a servant girl, Bathory discovered a novel new skin product: human blood. She was almost 40 at the time and was becoming concerned that she was losing her looks; it seemed to her that when blood splashed on her skin it appeared to make it look younger. Soon she was wallowing in human blood and drinking it by the gallon. To acquire it, she often employed a cage suspended from the ceiling by a rope, with spikes on the inside. According to rumour, when one 12-year-old girl tried to escape from the castle, she was put in the cage and one of Bathory’s male helpers, a dwarf called Ficzko, poked a red-hot poker through the bars. Trying to avoid the poker, the girl slowly bled to death – and Bathory wallowed in the rain of blood below.
The World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 13
