The World's Most Bizarre Murders

by James Marrison

  When the press learned who Burgos was and that he had confessed, it made a strange final twist to the story. The apparently inoffensive, harmless-looking, slightly chubby and balding middle-aged man who still lived with his parents – this was the so-called ‘Barrancas Ripper’?

  What had really happened that night? What had driven this well-educated and seemingly gentle young man to kill? According to Burgos, it had all begun with a terrible and violent argument after he had finally learned that Alcira had been using him all along and didn’t love him at all. For ten years, Burgos had been in love with her but she had never once returned his affections. She had seemed to warm to him lately, though – or, at least, that’s what he had thought. When she had finally accepted his offer to come to Buenos Aires and stay with him while his parents were away on holiday, he had been overjoyed.

  But when Alcira arrived in Buenos Aires, Burgos soon found out that he had been mistaken. She had been seeing someone behind his back and it turned out she had no intention of living with him or marrying him. He had even found some love letters from another man hidden in the pages of a book she gave him. But he went ahead anyway and asked her to marry him. She laughed in his face. During the violent quarrel that had ensued, Burgos called her ‘a lying whore’. She lashed out. He punched her and then throttled her.

  He told police that he had tried to revive her but it was no good. She was dead. He put her on the bed in his bedroom. From the crime novels he loved reading, Burgos knew that if the body was never identified he stood a much greater chance of getting away with murder. So, he took off her clothes and carried her to the bathroom. He cut off her head first and spent the rest of the night cutting the body into pieces in the bath, drinking a bottle of whisky as he did so. Then he went to the stationers and bought wrapping paper and string; he spent the next few days travelling firstly by train and then by bus, dumping his parcels all over town.

  According to one detective who was involved in the case, Burgos was deeply regretful about what he had done. ‘He cried like a baby,’ the detective remembered, ‘and did not stop repeating that it had never been his intention to kill her. I tried to explain to him that Alcira hadn’t really been the kind of girl you would have wanted to marry anyway but there was nothing you could say to him. He kept on crying and saying that he loved her.’

  Judge Cesar Black handed Burgos a sentence of 14 years in jail, which was reduced by appeal to 11 years and then reduced again to nine years and seven months for good behaviour. The murder became so infamous that soon after Burgos’s imprisonment a book appeared called I Didn’t Kill Alcira, with Burgos credited as the author. (In fact, it had been written by his lawyer, as a way to earn his fee back from the sales of the book.) It was a bestseller in Argentina.

  In a final bizarre twist to this case, Burgos’s parents died while he was in prison and left him the apartment in their will. Having nowhere else to go, the Barrancas Ripper moved straight back in and he lived there until he died, presumably sleeping in the same bed where he had stripped Alcira’s lifeless corpse and washing in the same bath where he had dismembered her all those years earlier.

  GOING POSTAL

  Incredible as it may seem, while some killers like Burgos dump the body parts themselves, other killers have actually used the postal service to get rid of the bodies of their victims, mailing them bit by bit to different addresses. In fact, it seems to be quite a popular tactic today, with frequent accounts in the press of people receiving bloody and totally unexpected parcels all over the world.

  Usually when someone receives a human body part in the post, it is not the result of foul play but the result of a mix-up made by hospital administrators, the postal service or sometimes both. As hospital researchers and doctors regularly send body parts in the post, it is inevitable that the odd human limb or internal organ gets sent to the wrong address.

  For instance, three years ago in Missouri, FedEx workers opened up a package that seemed to be leaking and discovered two legs and an arm that had been sent by a donor research company in Las Vegas. In 2007, another parcel delivery service, DHL, made a mistake and delivered a bubble-wrapped liver and part of a human head to a horrified couple in Michigan. The body parts had been sent from a lab in China and should have been on their way to a research laboratory in the States. Most recently, a human eyeball was accidentally delivered to a hotel in Hobart, Australia; when the receptionist saw what was in the parcel, she wisely decided to put it in the fridge.

  But sometimes there is a far more sinister explanation for a bloody package, and by far the most famous bloody package of all time has to be the one that arrived during the evening mail on 16 October 1888 and was addressed to a certain Mr George Akin Lusk in London.

  FROM HELL

  George Akin Lusk was a builder by trade and had recently been elected Chairman of the Mile End Vigilance Committee – a group of well-to-do businessmen and merchants who were offering a reward for information on a killer who was stalking prostitutes in Whitechapel and had been dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’ by the press. Lusk and his associates had put posters up all over the city and announced their award in the London papers.

  The package that arrived at Lusk’s house on that October evening contained a letter and a three-inch-square cardboard box containing half a kidney that had been preserved in wine. The note read as follows:

  From hell.

  Sor

  I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer

  Signed Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk

  Although it has never been ascertained whether any of the other 600 so-called ‘Ripper letters’ are genuine, the ‘From Hell’ letter is adjudged to be the real thing by many Ripper experts. True, it could have been a hoax, perpetrated by medical students from the London Hospital, and Lusk, who had received plenty of prank letters since becoming Chairman of the Vigilance Committee, certainly thought so. But, erring on the side of caution, he put the kidney (which he thought belonged to an animal) along with the note in his desk drawer and decided to mention it at the next meeting, just in case.

  At the next session of the committee, which took place four days later, he showed the kidney and the letter to the other members. Several members immediately decided to take it to the Curator of the Pathology Museum at London Hospital, Doctor Thomas Horrocks Openshaw. Dr Openshaw examined the kidney and declared that it was a portion of a left adult human kidney. Consequently, the letter and package were taken to Leman Street police station.

  The package had arrived three weeks after the gruesome murder of Catherine Eddowes, who had been found dead in Mitre Square, Aldgate, on Saturday, 29 September 1888. The killer had cut her throat, mutilated her face, repeatedly stabbed her and removed part of her womb. Crucially, he had also carefully removed her kidney and taken it with him – presumably as a souvenir.

  More recent bloody packages definitely involve foul play and are no ruse or prank. For instance, in 2002 in Bangalore, India, a man working in a video shop received a parcel in which he found the palm of a right hand and part of a left leg. The sender of the body parts was never discovered, nor was the identity of the body.

  The year before that, in 2001, in the Czech city of Brno, postal workers found a grisly bundle in a neatly wrapped package that had been sent from Prague four days earlier. Inside, they found a badly decomposed severed human arm and leg. The parcel had been returned to the postal office as the address written on it was non-existent and the parcel had been lying among the piles of undelivered mail ever since.

  Two weeks later, a second package arrived with similar handwriting on the front and addressed to the same location. This time, postal workers immediately called the police, who discovered yet more body parts. The body, however, was never identified. In fact, an autopsy was unable to determine whether the victim was a man or woman. Although the police did
not release any information as to what body parts were contained in the second package, a spokesman told journalists that tests had shown they belonged to the same person, believed to be either an adult or a teenager.

  The most recent case of a killer couple going postal was in China in 2007. According to the newspaper China Daily, in January of that year a young man and a prostitute murdered a 50-year-old man, chopped him into pieces and then shipped his body to three different cities in China in cardboard boxes labelled ‘medicine and machine fittings’. The first parcel was intercepted by police in Qingdao city, in China’s eastern Shandong province, after postal officials reported that it was dripping blood. Inside, police found a human torso; two days later, they intercepted two other parcels containing the remaining limbs and head. The couple had been captured on closed-circuit television as they signed the release of the parcels in the shipping company under the fake name ‘Song Deyuan’, which means ‘sent far away’ in Chinese.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  WEIRD SCIENCE

  Meet ten of the most notorious scientists in the world.

  TEN

  Giovanni Aldini

  Twenty years before Frankenstein’s monster was kick-started into life with a lightning bolt, Giovanni Aldini was putting massive currents of electricity into human bodies and watching them twitch. Nephew and disciple of Luigi Galvani, who investigated the effect of electricity on dissected animals in the 1780s, Aldini took a show on the road that involved cutting off the heads of cattle and making them roll their eyes. He also demonstrated, before packed and often horror-struck audiences, moving human limbs and making severed human heads grimace and wink.

  In 1803, Aldini applied an electric current to hanged criminal George Foster before the distinguished guests at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Foster’s face twitched horribly when Aldini attached a current to it, but he really started to move when Aldini electrocuted his rectum. His movements, according to once spectator, ‘so much increased as almost to give an appearance of reanimation’.

  Aldini wasn’t the only reanimator. Carl August Weinhold beheaded several kittens, then zapped them and made notes as they flopped about, and Dr Andrew Ure experimented on the corpse of hanged murderer Matthew Clydesdale in Scotland. So impressive was this show that two gentlemen in the audience became convinced the murderer was going to make a second reappearance and ran for it; another fainted.

  NINE

  Dr Robert J White

  In 1908, Charles C Guthrie grafted the entire head of one dog on to the neck of a larger dog whose own head remained intact. Result: a two-headed dog. But in the 1970s, neurosurgeon Robert J White went much further. After creating his own dog with two brains, he carried out the first successful mammalian head transplant on to a rhesus monkey. As surgeons are yet to devise a way to reconnect severed spinal nerves, the monkey was paralysed from the neck down. Understandably furious, the monkey tried to bite one of the surgeons the moment it came to. It survived for eight days with another monkey’s head attached to its body (or another body attached to its head, depending on which way you look at it).

  In 1999, White and his team developed a blood-cooling system, which could extend the life of a severed human head while it was being surgically connected to another body. By claiming that the same procedure could be carried out on a human being, White got himself branded as a Dr Frankenstein by the press and invoked the fury of many fellow surgeons, who claimed that his actions were both grotesque and unethical.

  Dr White’s motivations for the bizarre experiments, though, were entirely humane. It was his belief that his head-swapping experiments will one day give many quadriplegics a longer life. In an interview with the New York Times, Dr White explained, ‘For a quadriplegic who is already paralysed, the main cause of death is generally the eventual failure of several organs. If such a person were to be given a new body, it would be a new lease on life, even though he or she would still be paralysed.’

  EIGHT

  Paracelsus

  Born Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, Paracelus (as he preferred to call himself) was a child prodigy already deeply into the complex arts of alchemy as a 14-year-old; by the age of 34, he was the most celebrated man of learning of his day. Born in Austria in 1493, Paracelsus is still highly regarded by the scientific community for founding the science of medicinal chemistry. He is also remembered for carrying out one of the most bizarre experiments of all time – and in the process telling one of the biggest fibs in scientific history.

  Paracelsus claimed that he had put human sperm in a sealed container to putrefy and then buried it in the depths of a stinking pile of rotten horse manure. He claimed that he had carefully maintained the temperature of the manure so that it equalled the temperature of a mare’s womb and fed the sperm rotten human blood from time to time so that the sperm first became ‘agitated’ and began to move. After 40 weeks, he reported, he opened the container and had, through his careful efforts and patience, created his very own 16th-century ‘mini me’, which he called a ‘homunculus’. The homunculus, he said, was around a foot tall and he was able to educate it like any other child until it reached maturity, when it promptly left home and never returned.

  The concept of the homunculus was later taken up by occultist Aleister Crowley. In his novel The Moonchild, Crowley defined it as ‘a living being in form resembling man, and possessing those qualities of man which distinguish him from beasts, namely intellect and power of speech, but neither begotten and born in the manner of human generation, nor inhibited by a human soul’. The homunculus, he went on to say, was ‘the great idea of magicians of all times to obtain a messiah by some adaptation of the sexual process’.

  Rocket scientist-turned-occult spiritualist Jack Parsons, a disciple of Crowley, later became intent on creating an homunculus himself. Crowley and his acolytes believed the homunculus (which they called a ‘moonchild’, in a reference to Crowley’s book) would signal the end of Christianity and usher in a new era unfettered by outdated Christian values. It is believed that it could have been while Parsons was trying to create a homunculus in his lab that he accidentally mixed fulminate of mercury with explosives and blew himself up.

  SEVEN

  Dr Larry Ford

  A devout Mormon, Sunday-school teacher and family man, Dr Larry Ford seemed harmless at first sight. He lived in a big, comfortable house in a quiet suburb of Irvine, California, and was married with three children. A biotechnology entrepreneur by trade, Ford had graduated with honours from Brigham Young University and was a trained gynaecologist, microbiologist and ex-faculty member of UCLA in Los Angeles.

  For the last ten years of his life, Ford had run a successful biotechnology company called Biofem Inc., with entrepreneur and marketing expert Patrick Riley. For much of that time, Ford had been working on a radically new type of female contraceptive: a suppository that would kill germs transmitted through sex and which would be capable of preventing every known sexually transmitted disease – including AIDS. Together, the two men planned to market the product under the name ‘Inner Confidence’.

  The potential of the project was, of course, huge. Ford and Riley believed that, once testing was complete and the product was in the marketplace, it would generate $400 million a year in profit. But Ford had become increasingly aggravated by the fact that, under his contract with Riley, half of all the profits made from every single one of his inventions went automatically to his business partner. It was for that reason that, in 2000, he decided to get rid of Riley for good and hired a hit man to shoot him dead in the company’s car park.

  Riley survived the hit, however, and Ford immediately became a prime suspect in the case. Three days later, after a meeting with his lawyer, Ford realised that the police were fast closing in on him, went into his bedroom, locked the door and blew his brains out with a double-barrelled shotgun. But, as police were to find out, there was much more to Ford than the apparent absent-minded and well-meaning f
açade he had projected to his community and his peers. In fact, Larry Ford was a real-life Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

  Ford had a number of shotguns and rifles in his home, all of which he had a licence for, but when police searched his house more thoroughly they discovered thousands of rounds of illegal machinegun ammunition hidden under the floorboards. They then received an anonymous telephone tip-off that Ford might have stockpiled weapons and biological materials in his garden.

  This was confirmed when police found six white cylinders buried beneath a concrete slab near his swimming pool. Every single resident within a 300ft radius of the Ford home was immediately evacuated. The cylinders were found to contain C4 plastic explosive and machineguns. In all, gun nut Ford had enough C4 plastic explosives, guns and ammunition to take out the whole block.

  But that was nothing compared to the biological substances Ford had in his fridge. Police found 266 vials of lethal toxins and cultures of botulism, typhoid fever, salmonella and cholera, most of it stored in the fridge in his garage, and also one of the most deadly substances known to man – ricin – standing in a jar next to a salad dressing in the fridge in his office. Ricin is 6,000 times more toxic than cyanide and 12,000 times more poisonous than rattlesnake venom.