‘This guy doesn’t have the same rights we do and he doesn’t get treated with the same respect we do. And… someone like me writes to him just to tell him that, even though I don’t understand why he did what he did and I can’t ever understand what he’s going through, I still want to be his friend, even if he never wants to tell me why he did what he did.
‘I just want to be there for the bad days when a prison guard treats him like crap or a fellow inmate treats him like crap, or the days when he’s sick and he doesn’t have his family there to take care of him and all he can do is sit in his cell all day and feel like crap. I just want him to know that I’m thinking about him and hoping that he gets better.’
CELEBRITY PSYCHOS
The groupies are an organised bunch. They remind each other to send the killers Christmas and birthday cards, and are always happy to forward a killer’s address. I discovered that many girls write to six or seven killers on a regular basis. With the proliferation of websites dedicated to contacting convicted murderers and Death Row inmates, the phenomenon of the serial-killer groupie is likely to continue.
Death Row inmates are often in their cells for 23 hours a day, and so have an awful amount of time on their hands. Chances are, if you take the time to write to them they will write to you. But the more notorious the killer the more letters he will receive, so befriending one of the ‘big catches’ takes more persistence. Indeed, some of the killers are so well known that establishing contact with them is not dissimilar to becoming a close friend with a celebrity. Perhaps some of us feel impulsively drawn to contact people in the public eye because fame is at such a premium these days – no matter how gruesome the process through which that fame was achieved.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SEVEN
Seven Deadly Sins. Seven Final Tales of Bizarre Murder and Mayhem.
LUST
Romantic story of a man defying the terrible inevitability of death, or a sordid tale of a dirty old man with a taste for necrophilia? Either way, the story of Count Carl Von Cosel has to be one of the most bizarre tales of all time. According to research carried out by Ben Harrison for his fascinating book Undying Love: The True Story of a Passion That Defied Death (2001), German immigrant and self-appointed aristocrat Count Carl Von Cosel had left Germany behind in 1927 to look for a new life in Florida’s Key West. There, he managed to get work as a radiologist at Marine Hospital, where he met Cuban beauty Elena Hoyos. But Hoyos was dying of tuberculosis, and, while the good doctor did everything in his power to save her, he could not do so. She died soon afterwards.
While the love had been one-sided (she was only 22 when she died; Cosel was 56), the family knew that the grief-stricken doctor had genuinely cared for her and allowed him to construct a mausoleum in memory of his lost young love. Cosel hadn’t given up on her quite yet, though. Every night, without fail, he would go down to the mausoleum where, he later claimed, the ghost of Elena would declare her undying love for him and beg the good doctor to get her out of her tomb.
This went on for a year and then, rather strangely, his nightly jaunts to the mausoleum suddenly stopped. This seemed rather out of character to the dead woman’s sister. All the same, she didn’t actually do anything about it for seven years; when she finally went to the mausoleum, she was told that the body wasn’t there any more. She had a pretty good idea where to look, though…
To her horror, she discovered that Cosel had removed her sister’s body and had been happily living with it for seven long years. As well as subjecting the corpse to huge amounts of electricity through a Tesla coil specifically designed for the purpose of trying to bring Hoyos back to life, Cosel had also tried to completely reconstruct it. But legend has it that things hadn’t exactly got off to a great start for the reunited couple: Cosel, in his excitement, had dropped the body as he carried it over the threshold for the first time and it had promptly fallen to pieces.
From then on, Cosel kept the bones from slipping off the decaying flesh with piano wire, replaced the rotting eyeballs with glass ones (ordered months apart in order to avoid suspicion) and made a wax death mask out of the face. As for her hair, that was less of a problem as a lot of it had fallen out years ago while he had been zapping the corpse with X-rays (naturally he had kept the hair as a souvenir). Then, in order to give the body some kind of shape, he stuffed it with formaldehyde-coated rags.
As well as dressing the corpse up in a wedding dress and sleeping beside it each night, he talked with it and played it music. He was also regularly having sex with it.
Incredibly, Cosel was never prosecuted for his crime and the doctors concerned made no mention of their grisly findings at the time in order to spare the feelings of the public, who had strangely found the whole thing rather romantic. It was for this reason that the body had to suffer one final indignity before being laid to rest. As the story had caused such a stir and as so many people had been so moved by this tale of ‘endless love’, the corpse was put on display at the Lopez Funeral Home so that rubberneckers could have a nice long look at the corpse bride. Her body was then buried at last – in a secret location so that the doctor would never be able to find her and dig her up again.
PRIDE
Whether anyone has actually committed the perfect murder is, of course, unknown, but we do know that an attempt to actually carry it out has proven the downfall of more than one self-titled master criminal. For a classic example, let us turn to the case of 19-year-old clerk Herbert Leonard Mills, who killed someone just to prove that he could get away with it.
On 2 August 1951, Mills invited 50-year-old Mabel Tattershaw on a date after spotting her outside a cinema in Nottingham. Flattered by the young man’s attentions, she agreed and the next day the two went to a secluded orchard two miles from her home. Once there, Mills immediately strangled her and then dumped the body in some nearby bushes.
Mills waited and waited, but nobody seemed to notice that Tattershaw was missing. It was no good committing the perfect murder if nobody actually realised that a murder had taken place, so the annoyed Mills phoned the News of the World from a payphone and told the astonished reporter on the other end of the line that while he had been out reading poetry he had found a body; the police were contacted immediately and Mills took them to the orchard.
Although he was immediately a suspect in the case, Mills was not charged with the murder and so, emboldened by his initial success, he went further, assuring a reporter from the News of the World that the police would never catch the killer who was, he told them, far too clever for the bungling cops. Mills also claimed that it was pretty obvious to anyone who cared to look that the woman had been strangled – something that the police had yet to establish.
Actually, as Mills boasted to reporters, police were fast closing in on the self-professed genius, because Mills had left fibres from his coat under her nails and strands of his hairs on her coat. Still he persisted with his boastful behaviour, seemingly eager to do the authorities’ work for them until, unable to contain himself any longer, he eventually felt compelled to confess to the murder. After writing a long account of the crime, which he gave to (you guessed it) the News of the World, he turned himself in to the police. In his confession, Mills wrote: ‘I had always considered the possibility of the perfect crime… I am very much interested in crime. Seeing an opportunity of putting my theory into practice I consented to meet her on the morrow… I put on a pair of gloves. I knelt, my knees on her shoulders… I was very pleased. I think I did it rather well. The strangling itself was quite easily accomplished.
‘I have been most successful, no motive, no clues,’ he wrote. ‘Why, if I had not reported finding the body, I should not have been connected in any manner whatsoever. I am quite proud of my achievement.’
It took the jury less than half an hour to sentence Mills to death.
Incidentally, another excellent example of a killer’s warped sense of pride came courtesy of chubby serial killer Rudolf Pleil. Pleil was
accused of killing nine women in Germany from 1946 to 1947 but insisted on telling the jurors that the body count was actually much higher. He was ‘the best death-maker’ in Germany, he told them, and boasted that he had claimed 25 victims in total. Germany’s self-professed greatest killer strangled himself in his own cell in February 1958.
GREED
One game show contestant in Colombia was so keen to win a $25,000 cash prize that she admitted being involved in an attempted murder live on national TV. The contestant was appearing on the controversial lie-detector game show Nada Mas Que la Verdad (‘Nothing But the Truth’) when she made the stunning confession – and walked off with the prize.
The admission was aired in May 2007 before an estimated five million viewers – and the woman’s visibly shocked son, who was sitting in the studio audience. In the show (which has also screened in the UK under the name Nothing But the Truth, hosted by Jerry Springer), contestants are hooked up to a polygraph machine and asked increasingly intrusive and embarrassing questions. The more answers the contestants answer truthfully, the more money they win. The incredible confession immediately caused the TV station to pull the plug on the show for good after the channel was inundated with complaints by horrified viewers.
The show had just started when the host, who had previously been tipped off about the incident, asked, ‘Did you pay a hit man to kill your husband?’
‘Yes,’ the woman replied.
Seated in the audience, the woman’s shocked son piped up, ‘I didn’t know that.’
Quickly, the woman added, ‘The crime was never carried out, though. The hit man warned my husband and he ran away for ever and never came back.’
During previous episodes of the show, other contestants had confessed to fraud, drug-dealing and bribery, but owning up to an attempted murder was too much for the TV channel and police immediately began investigating the incident. The confession was particularly shocking in Colombia because hit men are known to carry out a murder for as little as $500 and according to local press are responsible for a great many of the estimated 17,000 murders committed each year in the crime-stricken country.
WRATH
Here, we are in the realm of the spree killers who, in a fit of rage, set out to wipe out as many people as they can in a single day. That day invariably ends with them turning the gun on themselves and blowing their own brains out. A spree killer’s fury can be invoked by a myriad of seemingly mundane reasons. They are angry because they have been, or are about to be, fired: postal worker Patrick Henry Sherril killed 14 people in Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1986 – hence the term ‘going postal’. They have just been jilted: sheriff deputy Tyler Peterson used an AR-15 rifle to kill six people at a party in Crandon, Wisconsin, in 2007, after failing to get back together with his girlfriend. Or they believe their fellow workers are plotting against them: lab technician Leo Held killed six people in Loganton, Pennsylvania, in 1967.
One of the most deadly spree killings of all time occurred in 1982 in South Korea when policeman Woo Bum-kon went berserk after he had an argument with his girlfriend. After the quarrel – which, according to some reports, began because his girlfriend had swatted a fly off his chest and awoke him during his afternoon nap – Woo Bum-kon got drunk and headed to the armoury at his local police station. There he grabbed two carbines, 18 rounds of ammunition and as many grenades as he could carry.
Using his position as a police officer to gain entry into people’s houses, he then embarked on an eight-hour murder rampage through five villages, leaving a staggering 53 people dead and a further 36 injured. It all ended in the early hours of 27 April when police finally cornered him, whereupon he strapped two hand grenades to his chest and blew himself up. Tragically, he killed a further three hostages in the process.
Cuban-born Julio Gonzalez was another killer who did away with a great many people after a lover’s tiff. On 25 March 1990, Gonzalez was thrown out of the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx because he had an argument with his ex-girlfriend, who worked there. Minutes later, he came back with a dollar’s worth of petrol in a can, which he poured on the stairs, effectively sealing up the only entrance and exit to the club. He then lit two matches, set the petrol alight and calmly walked across the street, where he watched the ensuing blaze. A total of 87 people died in the bloody inferno that followed.
There were only five survivors; among them was Lydia Feliciano, his ex-girlfriend.
SLOTH
Pulling off a murder typically requires considerable effort, but in one highly unusual case a murder was committed that stemmed not from aggravation over someone else’s supposed laziness, but from the slothfulness of the murderer herself.
In May 2000, 36-year-old Alison Firth poisoned 84-year-old Alzheimer’s sufferer Alice Grant with an overdose of the sedative drug heminevrin while working in an old people’s home in Gateshead. Grant had suffered two strokes in the previous year, was barely able to do anything for herself and needed frequent attention and care. Fellow nurses later testified that on the day before the murder they had heard Firth complain about her patient, expressing the wish that she would ‘hurry up and die’. On the next morning, when Grant was dead, Firth apparently commented that there was now ‘one less patient to get up in the morning’. One detective involved in the case told the press that Firth ‘would rather spend her time asleep on duty rather than care for patients and she set about, in what can only be described as an evil manner, to sedate Alice Grant with what was an overdose of the drug heminevrin’.
Judge Mr Justice Bell agreed, telling the court that Firth had committed murder ‘largely because she didn’t want to be put to the trouble of caring for [Alice Grant] in the future’. He sentenced her to a minimum term of 14 years in jail.
ENVY
Petty officer Alan Grimson, a fire drill instructor in the Royal Navy, wasn’t the best-looking guy in the world. In fact, his friends in the navy called him ‘Frank’ – short for Frankenstein. Grimson seemed to take the jibes on the chin. He had been in the navy for 22 years, travelled all over the world and was actually well liked and respected by his colleagues. But, although he hid it well, Grimson was extremely sensitive about his looks. So sensitive, in fact, that psychologists later suggested it may well have been envy for other men’s good looks that caused him to kill.
In December 1997, Grimson invited 18-year-old naval rating Nicholas Wright to his flat, but became incensed when the good-looking Wright spurned his advances. Grimson punched him to the ground then hit him with a baseball bat, cut off his ear and slit his throat. When it was all over, Grimson punched the air in triumph. ‘It was such a feeling. I have never had that feeling. It was a feeling of power, a good feeling. I felt good about it,’ he told police later. It was, he added, ‘better than sex’. The next morning, he wrapped the body in plastic sheeting and dumped it by the side of an isolated country lane in Hampshire.
A year later, he killed again. After spending hours torturing and raping his second victim – 20-year-old Sion Jenkins – he handcuffed him to the bath, covered his head with a towel and beat him to death with a baseball bat.
At his trial, a psychiatric report described Grimson as having a ‘severe personality disorder of a psychopathic type’. Grimson, it stated, ‘was a loner who wore a charming mask’. In his sentencing, Judge Mr Justice Cresswell told Grimson, ‘You are a serial killer in nature if not by number. You are a highly dangerous serial killer who killed two young men in horrifying and appalling circumstances.’
As a fire officer in the navy, Grimson had travelled all over the world and is now a suspect in a number of missing-person cases – many of them involving sailors who were thought at the time to have jumped ship.
GLUTTONY
No collection of bizarre murders would be complete without a mention of what has to be the oddest murder in recent memory. In 2001, after several months of searching the internet, 41-year-old cannibal Armin Meiwes found somebody who wanted to be eaten. The message Meiwes had po
sted online was: ‘Seeking young, well-built 18- to 30-year-old for slaughter.’ His victim was 43-year-old engineer Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, who on 9 March 2001 willingly went to meet his killer at the main train station in Kassel. Meiwes then drove him to his farm in Rotenburg, where the two had sex.
Brandes had actually wanted to be eaten alive, but Meiwes wasn’t strong enough to literally rip the flesh from his bones as Brandes had wanted. So, instead, as per prior agreement, Meiwes plied him with booze and pills and then chopped off his penis. He then seasoned it, fried it and fed it to Brandes and ate some of it too. In a recent interview that was shown on Channel Five, Meiwes – or ‘the Master Butcher’ as he is sometimes referred to in Germany – went into harrowing detail of the events of that night. ‘I was relatively quick preparing it,’ he recalled, ‘as I thought that, because he had such a massive wound, he’d feel faint quite quickly.’
After letting Brandes bleed unconscious in the bath for three hours (during which time his killer lay on his bed and read a Star Trek novel), Meiwes cut his throat and killed him. He then hung Brandes’s body on a meat hook in the larder. The next day, he cut the body into pieces and froze the hunks of flesh in the freezer in pizza boxes. As it was a special occasion, Meiwes got out his best tableware and made a steak out of human flesh, which he ate with potatoes and sprouts. Over the ensuing months, Meiwes managed to consume over 20kg of flesh, which he ate lightly fried in olive and garlic, until police were alerted to the fact that a man in an internet chat room was boasting that he had eaten someone and was apparently looking for his next victim.
During the investigation and the consequent probe into the connection between the internet and cannibalism, German police discovered that there were well over 200 Germans who expressed their desire to be killed and fed to a cannibal, while a further 30 said that they would like to eat a fellow human being if the opportunity ever arose.
The World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 21
