MONSTER FROM HELL

THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN

2008-12-04T22:41:00.000-08:00

The Unsolved Death and Mysterious Afterlife of Television's

"Superman"... George Reeves!

Superman died at 1:59 am on June 16, 1959. Not the comic book character, of course, but the man who personified the "real" Superman for an entire generation of television fans. George Reeves, it was discovered, was not faster than a speeding bullet after all. Even though the initial coroner’s report listed Reeves’ death as an "indicated suicide", after more than four decades there are many who do not believe that he killed himself.The death of Superman remains an unsolved mystery. Could this be why his ghost is still said to haunt his former Benedict Canyon Drive home?

George Reeves grew up as George Besselo. His mother, Helen, became pregnant in her hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, eloped and then moved to Iowa. Shortly after settling in, she divorced her husband, took baby George and moved to Pasadena, California. It would not be until George joined the Army during World War II that he would discover a number of parts of his life that his mother had hidden from him. She had concealed his true birth date, the identity of his father and the fact that his stepfather had committed suicide eight years after Helen divorced him. This so disturbed Reeves that he didn’t speak to her through most of the 1940’s.

Growing up, Reeves was an accomplished athlete and in 1932, he entered the Golden Globes Boxing competition against his mother’s wishes. He did well in the competition and went to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1932. After having his nose broken nine times as a boxer, he hung up his gloves and decided to try his hand at an acting career.

In spite of his time in the ring and rugged good looks, Reeves was not a tough guy. In fact, one writer, James Beaver, discovered that Reeves was a "totally decent person. I honestly never spoke to anyone who didn’t like him a lot". He began to take acting lessons at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he met his first and only wife, Eleanora Needles. They married in 1940 and divorced nine years later.

Like most struggling performers, Reeves took a number of small parts. In his very first film, he played a minor role as one of the red-headed twins enamored with Scarlett O’Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND. His other screen credits included SO PROUDLY WE HAIL, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, BLOOD AND SAND and SAMSON AND DELILAH with Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr. But of course, Reeves’ claim to fame came when he was selected to play the mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, who was really Superman. His portrayal of the character on television became wildly popular and everywhere he went, children (and adults) clamored to meet him and obtain his autograph.

Reeves loved the public and it was said that he loved the ladies as well. Many who were close to Reeves say that he was a womanizer, breaking the hearts of many of the actresses that he worked with. Rumor also had it that he became involved with a number of prominent married women like the wives of film executives and other actors. It is believed that one of these affairs may have led to his death!

In the three months before his death, Reeves was involved in three mysterious automobile mishaps that almost killed him. The first time, his car was nearly crushed by two trucks on the freeway. Another time, a speeding car nearly killed him, but he survived thanks to his quick, athletic reflexes. The third time, Reeves’ brakes failed on a narrow, twisting road. All of the brake fluid, it was discovered, was gone from the hydraulic system, in spite of the fact that an examination by a mechanic found the system was in perfect working order.

"When the mechanic suggested that someone had pumped out the fluid, George dismissed the notion," said Arthur Weissman, Reeves’ best friend and business manager. Weissman always remained convinced that his friend had been murdered. He tried to convince Reeves that he needed to be careful but Reeves brushed off the warnings.

About a month later, he began to receive death threats on his unlisted telephone line. Most of them came late at night and there were sometimes 20 or more each day. Often, whoever was calling would simply hang up when he answered. They said nothing, but after a few graphic and detailed threats followed, Reeves knew it was the same person. Nervous after the near-misses in his car, Reeves filed a report with the Beverly Hills Police Department and a complaint with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. He even went so far as to suggest a suspect, a woman named Toni Mannix.

It was never explained why Reeves openly pointed the finger at Toni. The Hollywood gossip columnists had linked the two romantically for some time, but their relationship was never a public one. They were a secret couple, as Reeves was engaged to Lenore Lemmon and Toni was married to a man named Eddie Mannix, the vice president of Loew’s Theatres, Inc. and a former studio executive at MGM. According to Reeves’ friend Arthur Weissman, it was no secret that Eddie Mannix was disliked by everyone and was an uncouth and despicable man. He also believed that Mannix was responsible for the threats and attempts on Reeves’ life.

The D.A.’s office investigated Reeves’ complaint and it was soon discovered that both Toni and George were receiving telephone threats and crank calls. When that was disclosed, many people assumed that it was Eddie Mannix who had instigated the calls through employees or hired thuds.

Weissman believed that Mannix was behind Reeve’s near-fatal auto crashes as well. In the film and theater business, Mannix had access to a lot of people outside of the general public. For a price, these men could maneuver two trucks close together on the highway, or could drain the brake fluid from someone’s car. Furthermore, he was sure that Mannix also had access to someone who could arrange a murder too!

In spite of these personal crises, Reeves was on a professional high. He was not in any way despondent and in fact, had much to live for. Things were certainly going his way and offerings were pouring in to cash in on his Superman celebrity status. Just three days after his death, he was to have returned to the boxing ring with light heavyweight champion, Archie Moore. The exhibition match was to be played on television so that viewers across the country could tune in to see Superman beat the champ! Reeves told reporters that the "Archie Moore fight will be the highlight of my life".

After the fight, he was going to marry his fiancée, Lenore Lemmon, an attractive brunette and former New York socialite. They were to honeymoon in Spain and then go to Australia for six weeks, where Reeves would pick up over $20,000 for public appearances as Superman. The series had just been sold to an Australian television network and local viewers were demanding to meet the "man of steel".

Reeves then planned to return to Hollywood later in the year and star in a feature film that he would direct. He was then scheduled to shoot more episodes of Superman for syndication and with a hefty salary increase. This was not the sort of future that would cause a man to commit suicide. It could even be said that George Reeves had everything to live for.

But it all came to an end on June 16. Around 6:30 that evening, dinner was served at the Benedict Canyon home. Lenore Lemmon had prepared it for Reeves and guest Robert Condon, a writer who was there to do an article on Reeves and the upcoming exhibition with Archie Moore. After dinner, they settled down in the living room to watch television. About midnight, everyone went to bed.

Around 1:00 or 1:30 am, a friend of Lenore and Reeves, Carol Von Ronkel, came by the house with another friend, William Bliss. Even though the house was the frequent site of parties and entertaining, Reeves had an unspoken rule that he did not want guests after midnight. However, Von Ronkel and Bliss banged on the door until Lenore got up and let them in. George also got up and came downstairs in his bathrobe. He yelled at them for showing up so late at night.

Lenore calmed him down and a few minutes later, he poured a nightcap and then went back upstairs to his room. At that point, the other witnesses present stated that Lenore said something like, "well, he’s sulking... he’ll probably go up to his room and shoot himself!"

Moments later, a shot rang out in the quiet of the house! George Reeves, television’s Superman, was dead.

The Beverly Hills Police report of the incident states that while entertaining his fiancee and three others in his home, Reeves suddenly, and without explanation, left the room and impulsively committed suicide. He went up to his bedroom, they said, placed a pistol in his right ear and pulled the trigger.

Even though he believed his friend was murdered, Arthur Weissman surprisingly did not dispute this sequence of events. He said that this was just how it happened but that Reeves did not intend to kill himself! He explained that Reeves was just playing his favorite game (although a morbid one, in my opinion), a practical joke he enjoyed with a gun that was loaded with a blank. According to Weissman, that was why Lenore said what she did. All of Reeves’ friends knew that when he was drinking, he would sometimes fire a blank at his head in a mock suicide attempt, making certain that his arm was far enough away so that he didn’t get powder burns on his face!

Weissman claimed that, unknown to Reeves, the blank was replaced with a real bullet by someone hired by Eddie Mannix.

Reeves’ clandestine girlfriend, Toni Mannix, was an actress and former model who was 25 years younger than her powerful husband. She was also madly in love with Reeves and according to Weissman, their relationship was an open Hollywood secret. It continued for years and then came to an end when George announced that he was marrying Lenore Lemmon. Friends said that Toni was "enraged" over this new development and began bombarding Reeves with phone calls, making all sorts of threats. It was believed that both she and her husband, who was openly humiliated by Reeves over the affair, both had the perfect opportunity to seek revenge, especially since Toni possessed a key to the Reeves house.

Many were unhappy with the findings of "indicated suicide", including Reeves’ mother, Helen Besselo. She retained the Nick Harris Detectives of Los Angeles to look into the case. At that time, a man named Milo Speriglio was a novice investigator at the firm and played a small role in the investigation. "Nearly everyone in Hollywood has always been led to believe that George Reeves’ death was a suicide," he said in a later interview. "Not everyone believed it then, nor do they believe it now. I am one of those who does not." And neither did Helen Besselo. She went to her grave in 1964 convinced that her son was murdered.

The Nick Harris Agency, which had been founded in Los Angeles before the FBI was even in existence, quickly came to believe that Reeves death had been a homicide. Even based on the fact that many of the witnesses that night were intoxicated and incoherent, the detectives felt that they could rule out suicide. Unfortunately though, the Beverly Hills Police investigators chose to ignore their findings. A review of the facts seems to indicate the agency’s suspicions were well-founded.

To make matters more confusing, the detectives even managed to rule out Reeves’ macabre "suicide game" as the cause of his death. The agency operatives believed that someone else was in the house at the time!

For one thing, the absence of powder burns on Reeves’ face shows that he did not hold the gun to his head, as the police report stated. For the weapon to have not left any facial burns, it had to have been at least a foot-and-a-half away from Reeves’ head, which is totally impractical in a suicide attempt. In addition, Reeves was discovered after his death, lying on his back. The single shell was found under his body. According to experts, self-inflicted gunshot wounds usually propel the victim forward and away from the expended bullet casing.

Detective Speriglio made a careful examination of the police report and noticed that the bullet wound was described as "irregular". So, the agency reconstructed the bullet entry and exit. The slug had exited Reeves’ head and was found lodged in the ceiling. His head, at the moment of death, would have had to have been twisted, making a self-inflicted shot improbable. Speriglio suspected that an intruder had entered Reeves’ room and that the actor had found his gun. A struggle had followed and Reeves was shot. The intruder then escaped from the house unnoticed.

While interesting, this theory does not explain why the gun (normally loaded with blanks) had a bullet in it and how the intruder escaped from the house with other people inside.

Regardless, there is another discrepancy with the police report. It stated that Reeves had pulled the trigger of the gun with his right hand. Prior to his death, Reeves had been in a terrible auto accident. His Jaguar had hit an oil slick in the Hollywood Hills and had crashed into a brick wall. Reeves later filed a personal injury claim in Los Angeles Superior Court asking for a half-million dollars in damages... because his right hand was disabled!

But just how disabled was it? If Reeves could fight Archie Moore in an exhibition match, then surely he could have pulled the trigger on a pistol.

Regardless of whether or not he killed himself, it was obvious that Reeves’ death was never properly investigated. Police investigators never even bothered to take fingerprints at the scene and people like Arthur Weissman believed that they were pressured to make it an "open and shut" case. George Reeves, according to the official findings, had committed suicide. But did he really?

We will never know for sure. In 1961, Reeves’ body was exhumed and cremated, forever destroying whatever evidence was left behind. The death of George Reeves will always remain another unsolved Hollywood mystery.

Could this be why ghostly phenomena has been reported at the former Reeves house ever since? Many believe that the ghostly appearances by the actor lend credence to the idea that he was murdered. Over the years, occupants of the house have been plagued by not only the sound of a single gunshot that echoes in the darkness, but strange lights and even the apparition of George Reeves!

After Reeves’ death, realtors attempted to sell the house to settle the actor’s estate. Unfortunately though, they had trouble. Occupants would not stay long because they would report inexplicable noises in the upstairs bedroom where George had been killed. When they would go to investigate the sounds, they would find the room was not as they had left it. Often, the bedding would be torn off, clothing would be strewn about and some reported the ominous odor of gunpowder in the air. One tenant also reported that his German Shepherd would stand in the doorway of the room and would bark furiously as though he could see something his owner’s could not. There is also documentation of an extraordinary occurrence when two Los Angeles sheriffs were assigned to watch the house after neighbors reported hearing screams, gunshots, and lights going on and off during the night.

New occupants moved out quickly, becoming completely unnerved after encountering Reeves’ ghost, decked out in his Superman costume! The first couple who spotted him were not the first, nor the last, to see him either. Many later residents saw him too and one couple became so frightened that they moved out of the house the same night. Later, the ghost was even reported on the front lawn by neighboring residents.

In the 1980’s, while the house was being used as a set for a television show, the ghost made another startling appearance. He was seen by several of the actors and crew members before abruptly vanishing... creating yet another mystery in this strange and convoluted case!

Sources:

Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger (1975)

Haunted Places: The National Directory by Dennis William Hauck (1996)

Hollywood Unsolved Mysteries by John Austin (1970)

Hollywood Haunted by Laurie Jacobson (1994)

Haunted Houses of California by Antoinette May (1990)

The Hollywood Murder Case Book by Michael Munn (1987)

Ghost Stories of Hollywood by Barbara Smith (2000)

THE SAUSAGE VAT MURDER

2008-12-04T22:33:00.000-08:00

THE SAUSAGE VAT MURDER

Ghosts and Ghoulishness Surrounding a Horrible Historic Murder!

The ghost of Louisa Luetgert still walks the neighborhood where her home once stood, or at least that’s what the legends of northwest Chicago say. Louisa was the murdered wife of “Sausage King” Adolph Luetgert, a German meat packer who came to the city in the 1870’s. Killed by her own husband in one of the most grisly ways imaginable, her ghost not only haunts the area around Hermitage Avenue but the legends say that she hounded her treacherous husband.... from Joliet Prison to the grave!

After finding that his German sausages were well-liked in Chicago, Adolph Luetgert built a sausage plant at the southwest corner of Hermitage and Diversey Parkway in 1894. He was so taken with his own success that he also built a three-story frame house next door to the factory, which he shared with his wife Louisa. Experience the Ghosts, Local Legends & Best Kept Secrets of the Windy City!Weird Chicago Tours!

The A.L. Sausage and Packing Co. (Circa 1897)

Louisa Bicknese was an attractive young woman who was ten years younger than her husband. She was a former servant from the Fox River Valley who met her new husband by chance. He was immediately taken with her, entranced by her diminutive stature and tiny frame. She was less than five feet tall and looked almost child-like next to her burly husband. As a wedding gift, he gave her a unique, heavy gold ring. Inside of it, he had gotten her new initials inscribed, reading “L.L.”. Little did he know at the time that this ring would prove to be his undoing.

According to friends and neighbors, Luetgert’s fascination with his beautiful, young wife did not last long. The couple was frequently heard to argue and their disagreements became so heated that Luetgert eventually moved his bedroom from the house to a small chamber inside of the factory. Luetgert soon became involved with a girl named Mary Simerling, Louisa’s nice and a household servant. This new scandal also got the attention of the people in the neighborhood, who were already gossiping about the couple’s marital woes.

Then, on May 1, 1897, Louisa disappeared. When questioned by his sons, Luetgert told them that their mother had gone out the previous evening to visit her sister. After several days though, she did not come back. Finally, Diedrich Bicknese, Louisa’s brother, went to the police. The investigation fell on Captain Herman Schuettler, who author Richard Lindberg describes as “an honest but occasionally brutal detective”.

The detective and his men began to immediately search for Louisa. They questioned neighbors and relatives and soon learned of the couple’s violent arguments. They also talked to Wilhelm Fulpeck, an employee of the sausage factory, who recalled seeing Louisa enter the factory around 10:30 in the evening on May 1. Frank Bialk, a night watchman at the plant, confirmed his story. He also added that he saw both Luetgert and Louisa at the plant together. Apparently, Luetgert sent him out on an errand that evening and gave him the rest of the night off.

Schuettler also made another disturbing and suspicious discovery. Just a short time before Louisa’s disappearance, the factory had been closed for ten weeks for reorganization. However, the day before Louisa vanished, Luetgert ordered 378 pounds of crude potash and fifty pounds of arsenic. The circumstantial evidence was starting to add up and Schuettler began to theorize about the crime. He became convinced that Luetgert had killed his wife, boiled her in acid and then disposed of her in a factory furnace. With that in mind, he and his men started another search of the sausage plant. They narrowed the search to the basement and to a twelve-foot-long, five-foot-deep vat that was located next to the furnaces that smoked the meat. The officers drained the greasy paste from the vat and began poking through the residue with sticks. Here, officer Walter Dean found a small piece of a skull fragment and two gold rings. One of them was engraved with the initials “L.L.”.

On May 7, Adolph Luetgert, proclaiming his innocence, was arrested for the murder of his wife. No body was ever found and there were no witnesses to the crime, but police officers and prosecutors believed the evidence was overwhelming. Luetgert was indicted for the crime a month later and details of the murder shocked the city, especially those on the northwest side. Even though Luetgert was charged with burning his wife’s body, local rumor had it that she had been ground into sausage instead. Needless to say, sausage sales declined substantially in 1897.

A.L. Luetgert

Luetgert went to trial but the proceedings ended in a hung jury on October 21 after the jurors failed to agree on a suitable punishment. Some argued for the death penalty, while others voted for life in prison. Only one of the jury members thought that Luetgert might be innocent. A second trial was held and on February 9, 1898, Luetgert was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment at Joliet.

Luetgert was taken away to prison, where he became a shell of his former self. He babbled incoherently to the guards, claiming that his dead wife was haunting him, intent on having her revenge, even though he was innocent of her murder.

Luetgert, possibly insane by this time, died in 1900. And he was not the only one to suffer.... His attorney, Lawrence Harmon, believed that his client was telling the truth and that he did not kill his wife. He was sure that she had simply disappeared. In fact, Harmon was so convinced of Luetgert’s innocence that she spent over $2,000 of his own money and devoted the rest of his life to finding Louisa. Eventually, he also went insane and he died in a mental institution.

And Louisa, whether she was murdered by her husband or not, reportedly did not rest in peace. Not long after her husband was sent to prison, her ghost began to be seen inside of the Luetgert house. Neighbors claimed to see a woman in a white dress leaning against the mantel in the fireplace. Eventually, the house was rented out but none of the tenants stayed there for long. The ghost was also reported inside of the sausage factory but the place was later abandoned and recently, portions of it were turned into condominiums. As of this writing, no reports of the ghost in these new structures have surfaced.

Legend still has it on the northwest side that Louisa Luetgert still walks. If she does, she probably no longer recognizes the neighborhood where she once lived as the factory is long gone and the houses that once stood here have been replaced in recent years with condos and new homes. They say though, that if you happened to be in this area on May 1, the anniversary of Louisa’s death, there is a chance that you might see her lonely specter still roaming the area where she lived and died.

The former A.L. Luetgert Sausage and Packing Company and the Luetgert residence was located on the southwest corner of Hermitage Avenue and Diversey Parkway, just before Paulina Street on Chicago’s northwest side.

FRITZ HAARMANN - -The Butcher of Hannover

2008-06-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

FRITZ HAARMANN
The Butcher of Hannover

After the relative crime watershed of World War I, the 20th Century entered the "age of sex crime." Perhaps predictably, the country where this first became apparent was Germany , where the miseries and deprivation of hyperinflation and food shortage made their maximum impact. Hannover, an elegant municipality in the center of lower Saxony , was one of the cities most affected and it was in this sleepy hollow that Fritz Haarmann committed one of the most extraordinary series of crimes in modern times.

On 17th May 1924, some children playing at the edge of a river near the Herrenhausen Castle found a human skull and, on May 29th, another washed up on the riverbank. The town was sent in to frenzy on the 13th June when two more skulls were found included in the river's sediment. An autopsy proved the first two crania to be that of young people aged between 18 and 20 and the last skull found from a boy of approximately 12. In all cases, a sharp instrument had been used to separate the skulls from the torso and the flesh had been entirely removed.

It was initially thought that the human remains originated from the anatomical institute in Gottingen or that they had been flung into the river by grave-robbers fleeing from capture. Yet these theories remained unproven and the mystery gained further publicity when boys playing on a marshland unearthed a sack containing human bones. It had become impossible for the authorities to keep these grisly finds a secret and, whilst young boys continued to be reported missing (the number in 1923 grew to almost 600), the Hannoverian population was gripped by terror. The investigation highlighted that those missing were mostly aged between 14 and 18 and rumors were circulating that human flesh had been on sale at the public market.

On Whit Sunday in 1924, hundreds of people left Hannover and descended on the small paths and bridges of the Old Town, where they started searching for human remains. The vastness of this expedition was unprecedented in German criminal history and was spurred on primarily by the talk of a "werewolf" or "man-eater" at large. After a multitude of bones had been discovered, the city's central River Leine was dammed and inspected by policemen and municipal workers. The finds were horrific. More than 500 parts of corpses were detected, proved later to be the remains of at least 22 people, a third aged between 15 and 20. Approximately one half had been in the water for some time and the joints of many of the fresh bones had smoothly cut surfaces.

Every thief and sexual deviant in Hannover was questioned and, through dogged detective work and a series of strange coincidences, a suspect by the name of Friedrich (known as Fritz) Haarmann was taken to the court prison. The man was already known to the police as both a 'dealer' in clothing and meat and to the criminal investigation department due to his publicly homosexual status. His appearance and mannerisms in the ultra-reserved days of inter-war Germany redefined the conventional impression of murder and murderers.

Haarmann was certainly sympathetic in appearance, a simple man with a friendly, open expression and a courteous nature. Of average height, broad and well built, he had a rough 'full-moon' face and neat, cheerful eyes. His features were generally small and as unprepossessing as the rest of his appearance, the only notability a well-groomed, light brown moustache. Fritz's expression closed up completely as soon as the atmosphere became embarrassing and investigating officers soon realized that their suspect was a man of deep contrast. At times cagey and calculating, yet also talkative and hyperactive, desperately seeking sympathy and attention. His soft, white hands moved nervously, plucking and pulling constantly at his long fingers.

Whilst Haarmann's body was strong and coarse, it was also slightly feminine and his speech "was like the querulous voice of an old woman." The killer's almost constant defensiveness and embarrassment was reflected in his automatisms and stereotypes: the wiggling of his behind, the licking of his lips - even the constant blinking of his eyes. Haarmann loved 'feminine' pastimes, such as baking and cooking, but would smoke strong cigars at the same time. Although his appearance was, as the Hannover police stated, "far from evil", Fritz Haarmann entered the record books as Germany 's most prolific killer.

Deadly Combination

Haarmann had begun his crime rampage in September 1918, a time in which Germany was suffering economic depravation and severe food shortages. A young runaway by the name of Friedel Roth disappeared from home on the 25th, writing to his mother only to say that he would not return home until "she was nice again." Various friends of the boy were forthcoming with information and eventually led the police to no.27 Cellerstrasse, the home of a man they claimed had seduced Friedel. A detective surprised one Fritz Haarmann in bed with a young boy and he was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment for seducing the juvenile. Unbelievably, the rooms were not searched and, upon interrogation five years later, Haarmann confessed that the "murdered boy's head was stuffed behind the stove wrapped in newspaper."

The murderer's story was to take a dramatic turn in late 1919 when he met young Hans Grans at the Hannover railway station. A petty thief, Hans had run away from home and now earned his living selling old clothes at the station. The young boy approached the openly homosexual Haarmann with the purpose of prostituting himself for money. Remarkably, a friendship soon developed and Grans began living with the old man, where a bond of "madness and spiritual parasitism developed." The relationship was more than sexual and the insane ideas that surfaced in Haarmann's conscience always involved his young housemate.

Having carefully avoided his jail sentence throughout 1919, Haarmann served his penance from March until December 1920. Grans thieved his way around Germany during this time and, upon reunion at Christmas 1920, there followed a period of uninterrupted bliss until August 1921. The two thieves appeared as well-dressed, decent gentlemen and earned respect amongst the local people. Needless to say, however, the two men had more illicit intentions and plied their trade by begging or stealing laundry and selling it to the public.

In early 1922 the two men moved to no.8 Neuestrasse in the heart of the so-called 'haunted area". Haarmann was earning a good income; the thieving was accompanied by social security payments (he had been declared an invalid and therefore unable to work) and also his newfound role as a police informer. Haarmann double-crossed everybody and became a "custodian of the law and an information office for all criminal matters." Amazingly, the clothes that Haarmann passed around Hannover earned him the reputation as a benefactor of the homeless. His obvious homosexuality further hushed up any theories people may have had as to the origin of the garments. This was just as well as, in February 1923, Haarmann returned to his murderous past.

The killer detained two youths at Hannover station on the pretence that he was an officer inspecting the waiting rooms. The less attractive lad was sent away and Fritz Franke accompanied the phony officer home. Haarmann later claimed that Grans had turned up unexpectedly whilst the corpse of Franke was still in the room. Shocked, he simply stared at Haarmann and said, "When shall I come back again?"

Fritz Haarman's Reign of Terror

The murders now gained pace and in the following nine months 12 more young men's lives were taken. In almost every scenario, the victim was met at the train station and offered accommodation or work; or apprehended on the pretence that his abductor was a police officer. This guise was used so often that on one occasion, after a youth welfare worker had asked the guard as to whether Haarmann was employed in the same capacity, the station official replied, "No, he's a detective." Once in the Neuestrasse room the boy would be killed, according to Haarmann, by biting through his windpipe. Always with a view to his commercial instincts, the body would then be dismembered and the clothes and meat sold through the usual channels for smuggled goods. The useless portions were thrown into the River Leine.

One year later, when the items confiscated from the killer were on public display, victim's families discovered a wealth of personal artifacts, many kept as souvenirs and the remainder sold on through Haarmann's impressive distribution network. On each occasion there was normally an array of witnesses who had seen the recognizable Haarmann (and often Grans) approach and leave with the stranger. Such was the respect that the two men had now earned for themselves, however, that no incident was ever reported. On one such circumstance Haarmann even had the audacity to reply to an announcement in the paper offering a reward for information. He appeared at the family door under the guise of a criminologist, yet was said to have spent most of his time "laughing hysterically."

The murders continued unabated throughout early1924, Haarmann honing his remarkable knack of spotting disillusioned young tearaways at the station and then removing them casually into the night. Due to the nature of the victims, angry or estranged parents and friends often took a while to even report the disappearance. By then, the clothing and meat of the victims had been speedily distributed around Hannover and were practically untraceable. Without that sort of hard evidence, the police were at a virtual dead-end, although there were some particularly close calls. On one such occasion, a portion of the trader's meat was taken to the police because the buyer thought it was human flesh. The police analyst unequivocally pronounced it pork!

The disappearance of Erich de Vries on 14th June 1924 signaled the end of the killer's reign. In classic fashion, it was an offer of cigarettes at Hannover station that tempted the young lad to join the friendly stranger in his room. It was estimated at this time that the fugitive had murdered around 27 boys in less than 16 months: an average of almost two a month.

Despite the enormous manhunt now in operation, the killer had still not been apprehended and Hannover was at the point of public outcry. By late June of 1924 sheer terror had gripped the city and the "Werewolf" was still on the loose.

Incarceration of Fritz Haarmann

Throughout the panic that engulfed Hannover in 1924, Fritz Haarmann remained a definite suspect. Along with every other local sex offender, he was investigated repeatedly during May and June, yet no conclusive evidence could be found. Meanwhile, press announcements appeared giving details of the skulls in the hope of obtaining clues from the general public. The quantity of skulls and corpses still being discovered was generating a nationwide furor and a general lack of confidence in the German police force.

With the pressure mounting, the following course of action was agreed upon: as Haarmann already knew the town officials, two young policemen would arrive from Berlin at Hannover train station, pretending to be homeless and looking for a place to stay. They would then focus on the suspect's activities and hope to catch him in the act. Once again, however, the killer's incredible luck conspired against them as Fritz was found arguing with 15-year-old Karl Fromm, a boy who had spent several days at Haarmann's apartment. Fromm was being particularly "cheeky and supercilious" on this evening and, amazingly, Haarmann had the audacity to report him to the railway police, claiming that he was traveling on false papers. Once at the police station, though, Fromm turned the tables on the older man by accusing him of sexual harassment during his stay. Coincidentally, a member of the vice squad was at the station at this time and, in the knowledge that the police were hoping to arrest Haarmann, the officer decided to apprehend the suspect immediately. Before any unnecessary suspicions could be aroused, Haarmann was taken to prison on the morning of 23rd June.

The killer later claimed that he had only arranged to have Fromm taken into custody because he knew he was going to murder the boy and was afraid he would not be able to resist the urge for much longer. If this statement is to be believed, here was the first time that Haarmann's actions were motivated by any moral scruples and these alleged feelings of guilt were to prove his downfall.

Yet the case was not nearly as clear-cut as the substantial evidence would imply. Several hundred items of clothing found in Haarmann's room or confiscated from his acquaintances were collected and identified as the property of the missing children, but there was no evidence to declare he had been responsible for even one of the deaths. Haarmann inevitably claimed that the property in his possession was due to his business of trading and dealing in used clothes. He admitted having sexual relations with some of the children, yet denied any knowledge of the victims' current whereabouts and gave plausible explanations for the traces of blood present in the garments.

The suspect once again displayed considerable skill at avoiding taxing questions and prolonging the inquisition. Haarmann was an astute man and, understanding the rather secretive nature of homosexuality at the time, subsequently knew it would be difficult for the police to obtain incriminating evidence from his victims and their families.

Discovery and Confession

One of these victims was a boy named Robert Witzel, whose parents had continually besieged the police since their son's disappearance on April 26th 1924. When the first skulls were found later that year, Herr Witzel was persuaded to examine the evidence in order to confirm that his son's irregular jawbone was one of the discovered crania. All that was known at this time was that Robert had visited the local circus on the night of his disappearance with his best friend, the "sly and girlish Fritz Kahlmeyer." Fritz, silent throughout the entire ordeal, would only say that the boys had traveled to the circus with a "police official from the railway station." The reason for the boy's secretive nature was understandable; he too had been approached and sexually abused by Haarmann, who subsequently procured him for homosexual "society gentlemen." Items of Witzel's clothing were found in the killer's apartment, yet Haarmann would still not confess.

The breakthrough came when a couple walked into the police station and passed the Witzel family who sat outside the Chief Commissioner's office. Frau Witzel immediately recognized the man's jacket and asked as to where he had obtained the garment. The man admitted that he had acquired the coat from Haarmann and even provided an identification card in the trousers bearing the name 'Witzel'. The lady accompanying him was Frau Engel, Haarmann's landlady, who happened to be in the police station making enquiries concerning her tenant's military pension. An enormous stroke of luck in addition to the fabric evidence and, more importantly, one which finally convinced Haarmann to concede defeat.

The prisoner was consequently subjected to incessant and severe questioning, before being given relief and encouragement commensurate with the "unburdening of the conscience." After seven days of maniacal and emotional rages Haarmann broke down and asked for the superintendent and examining magistrate, to whom he would make a full confession.

The killer then took the court officials on a murder tour of Hannover. They were shown parts of corpses hidden in bushes, bones dredged from a lake and skeletons concealed around the city. Inevitably, more and more people stepped forward who had obtained clothing or meat from either Haarmann or Grans and the evidence snowballed.

Haarmann's character also changed during this period. He now opened up to the investigating authorities and displayed the helpful, childish and often sarcastic side to his nature. Only if confronted by the parents of his victims or if discussing the act of decapitation would the killer withdraw himself again. The general impression was that he felt relieved of a terrible burden by being able to discuss the darkness and fear of his abnormal sex-life. There was also a distinct degree of pride in having duped mankind, of whom Haarmann always spoke badly.

As a result of the information secured, Hans Grans was arrested on 8th July and the two men met on several occasions before their trials began. At these times, Haarmann was always troubled, where as Grans appeared indifferent to the entire affair. Haarmann remained in the prison until 16th August, before being sent to nearby Gottingen for psychiatric examination. The trial, unprecedented in German judicial history, contained 60 volumes of files and opened on 4th December 1924.

The Trial of Fritz Haarmann

The trial was conducted at the Hannover Assizes and lasted through 14 days and almost 200 witnesses. The much-publicized opening decree stated that Fritz Haarmann was "accused of killing 27 persons intentionally and deliberately" from September 1918 to June 1924.

Haarmann insisted on conducting his own defense and remained entirely nonchalant throughout the trial, at one point complaining that there were too many women in the courtroom. He was allowed remarkable freedom and was notably immature and irresponsible, frequently interrupting the proceedings. At one stage he demanded indignantly why there were so many women in the court; the judge answered apologetically that he had no power to keep them out. On another occasion, when a mother became too distraught to give evidence about her son with clarity, Haarmann got bored and asked to be allowed to smoke a cigar. Permission was immediately granted.

Nonetheless, the murderer's naive combination of fiction and fact was generally agreed as refreshing in contrast to the legal speak of the jurists and the confused hypocrisy of the authorities. To the journalists he once said reproachfully, "You are not to lie; we know you are all liars," and to the jury, "Keep it short. I want to spend Christmas in heaven with Mother." Haarmann was constantly amused by the proceedings and, remarkably, even brought a smile from the public on more than one occasion.

In contrast, Hans Grans, accused in two cases of instigating murder, appeared as a tough and unbreakable character. The jury subsequently branded him as the more dangerous (yet the more innocent) of the two. Grans was entirely focused on self-preservation, an attitude that was to prove his downfall as Haarmann became concentrated on his devilish desire for revenge; to take the one he loved the most with him to the dark land. Hence, Fritz formed incredible and completely inaccurate accusations of murder against his partner that the court whole-heartedly believed. Once he had achieved his aim of not going to death alone, Haarmann quieted down and let Grans do the talking.

Inevitably, though, the most chilling tale of all came when Haarmann took the stand to explain his murder method in the most graphic of detail.

"I never intended to hurt those youngsters, but I knew that if I got going something would happen and that made me cry ... I would throw myself on top of those boys and bite through the Adam's apple, throttling them at the same time."

Haarmann explained the guilt he often felt at this point, regularly collapsing on the dead body and covering the face with a cloth so "it wouldn't be looking at me."

"I'd make two cuts in the abdomen and put the intestines in a bucket, then soak up the blood and crush the bones until the shoulders broke. Now I could get the heart, lungs and kidneys and chop them up and put them in my bucket. I'd take the flesh off the bones and put it in my waxcloth bag. It would take me five or six trips to take everything and throw it down the toilet or into the river. I always hated doing this, but I couldn't help it - my passion was so much stronger than the horror of the cutting and chopping."

The skulls were smashed to pieces and thrown in the river or marsh, the clothes given away or sold. The more often this process occurred, the more efficient it became and, whilst the city of Hannover utilized the meat and clothing of its victims, Fritz Haarmann remained out of the authorities' reach.

Some boys he denied killing - for example a boy named Hermann Wolf, whose photograph showed an ugly and ill-dressed youth, Haarmann declared that the boy was far too ugly to have interested him.

The killer repeatedly claimed that he was driven by beauty and sensuality, not the cynical interpretation of sex or profit. In his eyes, it was easier to kill someone you loved - that way you brought them peace.

"Often, after I had killed, I pleaded to be put away in a military asylum, but not a madhouse. If Grans had really loved me he would have been able to save me. Believe me, I'm not ill - it's only that I occasionally have funny turns. I want to be beheaded. It'll only take a moment, then I'll be at peace."

The End?

The experts then submitted their reports to the effect that, although the killer had a "pathological personality", he had not been devoid of free will and responsibility and therefore bore no manic depressive insanity. Grans and Haarmann continued their petty squabbles throughout the summing up, their behavior towards each other remaining the same until the bitter end.

At 10am on 19th December 1924, Haarmann received 24 death sentences in 24 cases and Grans one death sentence for his supposed incitement to murder in the Hannappel case. Upon announcement of the verdict, Haarmann proclaimed,

"I want to be executed on the marketplace. On the tombstone must be put this inscription: 'Here Lies Mass-Murderer Haarmann'." The court acceded to neither request and Haarmann was duly decapitated within the walls of Hannover Prison. Grans's appeal was rejected and the death sentence pronounced correct and final.

Yet this story contains one final twist. A Hannover messenger named Lueters found a letter addressed to Albert Grans, father of the man under sentence of death, lying on the street. He made sure the letter was passed on to the addressee, who in turn passed it on to the court. The note was a four-page confession from Fritz Haarmann, written whilst being taken by car to the police station.

The letter summarized the relationship of Grans and himself and, most importantly, professed the innocence of the younger man.

"Hans Grans has been sentenced unjustly and that's the fault of the police and also because I wanted revenge ... Put yourself in Grans's position: he will question the existence of the Lord and justice just because of me ... May Hans Grans forgive me for my revenge and humanity."

The exact intention of this letter has never fully been understood. Was Haarmann truly troubled by his conscience, or was this simply a devious attempt to delay his own execution? It is now the common view of experts that the verdict of the Hannover court is an unsatisfactory one in the sense that Haarmann was undoubtedly put under pressure by certain authorities throughout the trial. It is most probably the case that a neglected and innocent young man has been sentenced to death solely as a result of statements made by a man pronounced mentally ill by five different psychiatrists. In this sense, as said by Theodor Lessing, a commentator on the Haarmann affair, "a judicial murder was committed." Like his other victims, Fritz Haarmann killed the one he loved, this time by using the German legal system as his weapon.

After the two men's deaths, another letter from Haarmann was found, this one explaining his actions purely as an attempt to take revenge against the police. The statement concludes,

"You won't kill me; I'll be back - yes, I shall be amongst you for all eternity. And now you yourselves have also killed. You should know it: Hans Grans was innocent! Well? How's your conscience now?"

Early Life of Friedrich Haarmann

Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was born the youngest of six children on October 25th 1879. His mother, 41 at the time of his birth, spoiled and pampered him as a child and encouraged young Fritz to play with dolls instead of more masculine games. Most crucial to the interests of a psychologist, Fritz disliked his father from an early age and was to continue this loathing throughout his life.

The parents were indeed an ill-assorted couple. 'Old Haarmann' was a morose and cantankerous locomotive stoker who was to be found at night rampaging his way around the seedy bars of the Old Town . His wife, Johanna Claudius, was seven years his senior and provided him with a dowry of several houses and a small fortune, making him a wealthy citizen in this time of rapid economic expansion. Johanna was a simple-minded, slightly stupid woman and managed to ignore her husband's continuous drunkenness and womanizing. The birth of her sixth child left her sick and she spent much of her remaining twelve years in bed.

As for Haarmann's siblings, the eldest son, Alfred, became a lower-middle class factory foreman with upright Philistine and family values. The second son, Wilhelm, was sentenced at an early age for a sexual offence and the three sisters, all of whom divorced their husbands early in married life, proved to be particularly obsessive and compulsive characters. Frau Rudiger was to meet a premature death in the Great War and Haarmann never got on with the fourth child, Frau Erfurdt. It was therefore left to the youngest sister, Emma, to provide Fritz's sole family connection.

From a young age Haarmann and his father argued and constantly threatened each other, the father to have his son put in an asylum and Fritz to have his father thrown in jail for the supposed murder of a train driver. The only occasions of unity were exhibited when the men would combine to either carry out a swindle or to appear in court to exonerate the other. In contrast, Haarmann always felt a deep bond with his mother and she remained the only person he spoke of with warmth and sentimentality.

The anecdotes relating to Haarmann's childhood show two distinct traits. The first is the notable feminine (possibly transvestite) tendencies that were exhibited throughout his school life. The second is the pleasure in causing fear and horror. Haarmann enjoyed tying up his sisters and regularly tapped on windows in the dead of night, awakening a dormant fear of ghosts and werewolves. The child was spoilt and easily led, yet lively and popular amongst his peers.

The boy failed his locksmith apprenticeship and so was sent to the training school for non-commissioned officers at Neu-Breisach in April 1895. Fritz was a good gymnast and an obedient soldier, but soon began suffering from periodic lapses in consciousness and epileptic fits. This was blamed on a concussion contracted whilst performing bar exercises or sunstroke suffered during the exercise. Haarmann dismissed himself from the sick bay in November 1895, saying that he "didn't like it there any more" and soon began working for his father.

Young Adulthood

Whilst Haarmann's laziness and inefficiency continued, his sexual development was progressing rapidly. Sexual offences against children occurred almost every day and it was not long before the molestation accusations began mounting. Eventually and inevitably, the pervert was deemed incurably deranged by the town doctor and was sent to an asylum shortly after his 18th birthday. It was here that the young man suffered some form of trauma that was to affect him for the rest of his life and his intense fear of the asylum caused him later to say, "Hang me, do anything you like to me, but don't take me back to the loony bin." Lackluster security soon allowed the patient to escape, however, and Haarmann fled to Switzerland .

At the age of just 20 he returned to Hannover and around 1900 achieved a sexually normal period when he seduced and married a large, pretty girl by the name of Erna Loewert. The engagement had the blessings of both sets of parents, who fervently hoped that the union would put an end to the young delinquent's reckless abandon. This was not to be the case, though, as Haarmann soon deserted the girl and their unborn child for military service.

He settled well into army life and, like the killer William Burke before him, became an excellent soldier; "full of obedience and esprit de corps." Haarmann was later to refer to this time as "the happiest of his life." A year went past with no incident until, in October 1901, Haarmann collapsed during a company exercise and was admitted to the military hospital for four months. It was diagnosed that the soldier had a mental deficiency and was deemed "unsuitable for use in community service."

Once again, Fritz was sent back to his quarrelsome family and resumed his life-long battle with his father. 'Old Haarmann' attempted to have him committed to an asylum, but the town doctor regarded him as merely "morally inferior" and, at the ripe old age of 24, Fritz Haarmann was released into society.

Numerous burglaries and confidence scams soon became a feature of Haarmann's life and, after 1904, he spent one third of the following 20 years either in custody or in prison. In 1914 he was sentenced to five years in jail for theft from a warehouse. Released in 1918, he joined a smuggling ring and conducted a prosperous business as a smuggler, thief and police spy (the latter activity guaranteed that his activities were not too closely scrutinized.) For a man supposedly struggling with sanity, Haarmann showed impressive signs of preparation and calculation in his crimes. The sexual offences also continued, although he was rarely convicted of such misdemeanors as the partners were too ashamed to report him to the police.

Upon release from prison in April 1918 Haarmann surfaced briefly in Berlin and then again in Hannover . The murders soon began.

Inside the Mind of Fritz Haarmann.

Having analyzed the life of one of Germany 's most depraved sons, it is now perhaps appropriate to ask ourselves what we have learned about the inner dimensions of a sex-killer's mind. Even though it has long since been accepted that there is no single reason for serial crime, the same contributing factors rear their evil head in the case of nearly all killers of this type. Fritz Haarmann is no exception and exhibits the same ugly traits as so many before and since.

Little was known of the workings of a psychopath at the time of Haarmann's murders, but the awareness and understanding of such crimes has now come a long way. Yet sex-killers cannot be detected by their appearance, domestic situations or day-to-day behavior. The sexual impulse is primarily a mental process and germinates within a secret, interior universe. Whilst the profilers are learning, as yet it is only through bloody hindsight.

Generally, serial sex murderers are classified in three broad types: the biological killer, whose crimes are triggered by a physical defect or injury of some sort; the psychologically predisposed killer (usually stemming from an all-female or particularly traumatic childhood); and the sociological or 'made' killers. The traits of young Haarmann noted in the previous chapter bring us to the frightening conclusion that Fritz is a strong candidate for all three of the above categories.

The biological influence is evident if we consider Haarmann's repeated head injuries and epileptic fits in his early adulthood. Indeed, a surprisingly large number of killers have a history of head injuries in their youth. Whether the troublesome youngster was truly turning the corner at the training school we shall never know, yet it does remain a tragedy that an ordinary accident seemed to put an end to an honorable attempt at obedience.

As to the second category, the child was pampered and mollycoddled from a young age and his features of feminism and sadistic pleasure are consistently repeated factors in the analysis of serial killers' childhoods. Haarmann was inherently incapable of holding on to abstract ideas; any impressions he received had to become reality immediately. When talking about sexual matters he would reach automatically for his genital area, even when being questioned in the courtroom. His upbringing developed a "raw creature, without logic and morals; yet also without logical and moral hypocrisy."

The so-called "made" killers are those who feel that life has cheated them and owes them more. In his early years Haarmann welcomed prison as confinement imposes structure on life and provides a meaning and order to existence. A crucial sociological feature of the case and one that is typical of the 20th Century penal system is that whenever Haarmann was released from jail both his craftiness and his crimes increased. Until the bitter end Haarmann pursued his 'rage against the machine'. It was later admitted that he was beaten whilst under police interrogation and his payback to Hans Grans was a perfectly executed attempt at embarrassing the authorities he so loathed. The court eventually had to change Grans's sentence to 12 years' imprisonment, yet only in Hannover would Grans have received any initial punishment.

Vengeance and Atonement

This idea of vengeance and atonement is, in Haarmann's case, rooted in sadism and is a mask for the sexual feeling. His actions towards his supposed friend, Hans Grans, were an act of revenge using the last remnants of power that the accused could exercise.

Indeed, the relationship between Grans and his mentor is certainly one of the most fascinating aspects of the case. Grans understood the older man's "wild, sick urges" and realized that he could thereby ensure his own power and control over Haarmann. Yet there was also a distinct gratitude and sympathy between the two, "I had to have someone I meant everything to. Hans often laughed at me. Then I got mad and threw him out. But I always ran after and fetched him back. I couldn't help it; I was crazy about the boy."

Haarmann did love Grans and Grans took advantage of it. He was the cleverer of the two and thus continually toyed and jested with his companion. As irony would have it, he was to receive the harshest possible payback for his efforts at manipulating Haarmann. Those who toy with the devil, are sure to be burned!

As a further scope for evaluation, the question of Haarmann's sanity is one that has never fully been resolved. Expert evaluation is entirely contrasting, although it is agreed that he was not ruled by the urge to torment others, but by the urge to kill at the height of his sexual desire.

Psychoanalysts declare that the criminal differs from the man who adjusts himself to society in that he fails to sublimate the aggressive primitive urges. The wounds inflicted upon him by injustice motivate these actions. There can be no doubt that Haarmann suffered harshly in his early life and in this way he obtained the subject matter for an easy later rationalization.

Haarmann's psychological examiners at the time believed that he saw his execution as one final, intense orgasm and the excitement of this possibility exceeded anything he had experienced in his day-to-day life. He rejected the inhibitions that society attempts to place upon us and manipulated love and crime into a sexual game and "comfortable semi-luxury." Haarmann murdered for profit, both sexual and financial - and yet, whilst often racked with remorse, he never at any time in his life felt the burden of fear upon him. Fritz Haarmann lived his entire life with a desire for his own destruction.

All text that appears in this section was provided by www.crimelibrary.com (the very best source for serial killer information on the internet). Serialkillercalendar.com thanks the crime library for their tireless efforts in recording our dark past commends them on the amazing job they have done thus far)

The Story of Aileen Wuornos

2008-06-11T02:04:00.000-07:00

The Story of Aileen Wuornos

Aileen "Lee" Wuornos is on Death Row in Broward County, convicted of the murder of six men. Lee says all of the men raped or attempted to rape her.

We Believe Aileen Acted in Self-Defense

At the time of the killings, Lee was working as a highway prostitute. All of the men she killed were men who picked her up and who, she says, violently attacked her.

Lee was picked up by many other men during this period and she did not harm them. Several men have testified that they spent days or weeks with her and she never threatened them. They did say that she was worried that they would attack her.

Prostitutes are much more likely to be raped than women in other jobs. One study of a group of prostitutes said that they had been raped an average of 33 times a year.

In the Seattle area, at least 65 prostitutes and strippers have been killed by the "Green River Murderer" who has never been caught. New York police recently arrested Joel Rifkin, who confessed to the murders of 17 prostitutes. When they stopped Rifkin by chance, the cops were not even investigating the disappearances of these women. Very few murders of prostitutes are ever investigated or solved.

We Believe Lee Did Not Receive a Fair Trial

Lee has been tried only once--for the killing of Richard Mallory--but has been convicted of six murders.

In her videotaped confession, which was the key evidence used by the prosecution in her trial, Lee said more than 60 times that she acted in self-defense. None of these references was included in the version of that tape which was shown to the jury.

The prosecution claimed that Mallory had no history of sexual violence. It was later revealed that Mallory had been convicted of attempted rape in Maryland, and had threatened to harm other women. Evidence of these prior attacks was not presented at her trial.

The jury was allowed to hear evidence of crimes Lee had not been convicted of.

We Believe Lee Was Inadequately Represented By Counsel

Her trial attorneys first failed to interview, and later failed to call, several witnesses who had volunteered information which corroborated Lee's testimony.

Her trial attorneys delayed in researching evidence of Mallory's history of violence against women. The judge then ruled it inadmissible because it was introduced too late.

Private attorney Steven Glaser encouraged her to plead no contest to five murder charges, without securing a sentencing offer or informing her of all her options.

We Believe Officers Involved In Investigating The Case Behaved Unethically

There is evidence that Volusia County sheriff deputies negotiated contracts for book and movie deals about Lee's case before she was even arrested.

Deputies arranged with Tyria Moore, Lee's former girlfriend, to set Lee up. Though Tyria was implicated in several of the killings, she was never charged.

Officer Brian Jarvis, initially the chief investigator on the case, was removed from the case when he questioned the conduct of his colleagues on the case. He later reported vandalism to his house, theft of his records on the case and threats against him and his family. We Believe Lee Is Not a Serial Killer.

According to the prosecution, portraying Lee as a "serial killer" won them the death penalty. Lee does not fit the profile of a serial killer.

No serial killer has ever claimed they killed in self-defense.

Serial killers stalk their victims; they do not kill in moments of fear or passion.

We Believe Sexism, Anti-Lesbian and Anti-Prostitute Prejudice Were Used To Condemn Lee To Death

Prosecutors made repeated references to Lee's romantic relationships with women. 80% of women on death row in Florida are lesbians. Though Lee does not consider herself a lesbian, society's fear and hatred of lesbians was used against her.

People have trouble believing that a prostitute would need to kill six times in self-defense. Yet recently, a Los Angeles store owner killed five men in four different armed robbery attempts. This man was never charged with any crime.

Tens of thousands of women are in prison in the U.S. for killing men who abused them. A study by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence found that men who kill their wives or girlfriends serve an average of 2-6 years, while women who kill their male partners serve an average of 15 years.

Ted Bundy, who killed more than 30 women in Florida, had offers from several well-known private criminal attorneys to defend him pro bono. At one time his defense team included five public defenders and a volunteer consultant on jury selection. Lee's supporters have been unable to find any such assistance for her; she has had to rely on overworked public defenders.

Demand Equal Justice for Aileen Wuornos

Write the Florida Supreme Court, 5th Judicial Circuit, 300 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach, FL 32114, and urge them to grant Aileen Wuornos a new trial.

Write letters of support to Aileen Wuornos, A#150924 DR1, Broward County Correctional Institution, P.O. Box 8540, Pembroke Pines, FL 33024.

Volunteer at or contribute to battered women's services or men's anti- violence programs in your community.

Contact the Aileen Wuornos Defense Committee, (415) 995-2392, 3543 - 18th Street #30, San Francisco, CA 94110 to find out how else you can help.

BLACK DAHLIA

2008-06-11T01:44:00.000-07:00

WHO KILLED THE
BLACK DAHLIA?
The Tragic Life & Death of Elizabeth Short

On January 15, 1947 a housewife named Betty Bersinger left her home on Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles, bound for a shoe repair shop. She took her three-year-old daughter with her and as they walked along the street, coming up on the corner of Norton and 39th, they passed by several vacant lots that were overgrown with weeds. She couldn’t help but feel a little depressed as she looked out over the deserted area. Development had been halted here, thanks to the war, and the open lots had been left looking abandoned and eerie. Betty felt slightly disconcerted and then shrugged it off, blaming her emotional state on the gray skies and the cold, dreary morning.

As she walked a little further along, she caught a glimpse of something white over in the weeds. She was not surprised. It wasn’t uncommon for people to toss their garbage out into the vacant lot and this time, it looked as though someone had left a broken department store mannequin here. The dummy had been shattered and the two halves lay separated from one another, with the bottom half lying twisted into what was admittedly a macabre pose. Who would throw such a thing into an empty lot? Betty shook her head and walked on, but then found her glance pulled back to the ghostly, white mannequin. She looked again and then realize that this was no department store dummy at all -- it was the severed body of a woman! With a sharp intake of breath and a stifled scream, she took her daughter away from the gruesome site and ran to a nearby house. From here, she telephoned the police.

The call was answered by Officers Frank Perkins and Will Fitzgerald, who arrived within minutes. When they found the naked body of a woman who had been cut in half, they immediately called for assistance.

The dead woman, it was noted, seemed to have been posed. She was lying on her back with her arms raised over her shoulders and her legs spread in an obscene imitation of seductiveness. Cuts and abrasions covered her body and her mouth had been slashed so that her smile extended from ear to ear. There were rope marks on her wrists, ankles and neck and investigators later surmised that she had been tied down and tortured for several days. Worst of all was the fact that she had been sliced cleanly in two, just above the waist.

It was clear that she had been killed somewhere else and then dumped in the vacant lot overnight. There was no blood on her body and none of the ground where she had been left. The killer had washed her off before bringing her to the dump site.

The horrible nature of the case made it a top priority for the LAPD. Captain John Donahoe assigned his senior detectives to the case, Detective Sergeant Harry Hansen and his partner, Finis Brown.

The body was soon covered from the stares of onlookers but by this time, reporters and police officers had trampled the scene.

By the time the detectives were contacted and could get to the scene, it was swarming with reporters, photographers and a crowd of curiosity seekers. Hansen was furious that bystanders and even careless police personnel were trampling the crime scene. Evidence was being destroyed, he knew, and he immediately cleared the area. Then, while he and his partner examined the scene, the body of the woman was taken to the Los Angeles County Morgue. Her fingerprints were lifted and with the help of the assistant managing editor of the Los Angeles "Examiner" (in exchange for information), the prints were sent to the FBI in Washington using the newspaper’s "Soundphoto" equipment.

Meanwhile, an examination of the body was started by the coroner’s office. It began to detail an incredible and horrifying variety of wounds to the young woman’s body, although the official cause of death was "hemorrhage and shock due to concussion of the brain and lacerations of the face."

An autopsy revealed multiple lacerations to the face and head, along with the severing of the victim’s body. It also appeared that the woman had been sodomized and her sexual organs abused but not penetrated. There was no sperm present on the body and most of the damage appeared to have been done after she was dead. The coroner also noted that her stomach contents contained human feces. Even the hardened doctors and detectives were shocked at the state of the girl’s corpse.

Shortly after receiving the fingerprints, the FBI had a match for the L.A. detectives. The victim of the brutal murder was Elizabeth Short, a 22 year-old woman who originally came from Massachusetts. During World War II, she had been a clerk at Camp Cooke in California, which explained why her fingerprints were on file.

Once the detectives had this information, they went to work finding out who knew Elizabeth Short, believing that this would lead them to her killer. What they discovered was a complex maze that led them into the shadowy side of the city.... in search of a woman called the "Black Dahlia".

Not a "mug shot" as some have identified it, but rather the photos taken for Beth's civilian ID at Camp Cooke.
(Wide World Photos)

Elizabeth Short was an aspiring actress who usually dressed entirely in black. Thanks to her nice figure and attractive face, men easily noticed her. Her hair was black and her skin pale, providing a striking contrast and a look that got her noticed, even in Hollywood, where good-looking dames were a dime a dozen.

Like all of the other pretty girls before and since, Elizabeth (who preferred the name Beth) came to Hollywood hoping to make it big in the movie business. She was smart enough to know that looks weren’t everything and that to break into films, she had to know the right people. So, she spent most her time trying to make new acquaintances that she could use to her advantage and to make sure that she was in the right nightspots and clubs. Here, she was convinced, she would come to the attention of the important people in the business. Beth’s pretty face got her noticed. She had done some modeling before coming to Hollywood and men couldn’t keep their eyes off of her.

In Hollywood, Beth roomed with a hopeful dancer who introduced her to Barbara Lee, a well-connected actress for Paramount. She took Beth to all of the right places, including the famous Hollywood Canteen, where she met a wealthy socialite her own age named Georgette Bauerdorf. Beth loved to socialize, loved the Hollywood nightlife and loved to meet men. Despite the rumors, Beth was never promiscuous and she did not work as a prostitute. Considering the findings of the coroner, it isn’t likely that sex with men involved normal penetration. Beautiful, lively and seductive, Beth was sometimes referred to as a "tease" as her boyfriends never had any idea that romance could only go so far.

One of the men who befriended Beth was Mark Hansen, a nightclub and theater owner who knew many important show business people. He eventually moved her into his house, along with a number of other young actresses who roomed there and who entertained guests at Hansen’s clubs. On any given day, a visitor to Hansen’s house could find a number of beautiful actresses and models sunning themselves by the swimming pool.

Beth soon became a part of this group, although her prospects for film work remained non-existent. She didn’t have much of an income and only seemed to eat and drink when others, usually her dates, were buying. She shared rooms with other people and borrowed money from her friends constantly, never paying it back. She never seemed to appreciate the hospitality given to her by others either, rarely contributing anything to where she was living and staying out most of the night and sleeping all day. She became known as a beautiful freeloader.

Around this same time, the film THE BLUE DAHLIA, starring Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd was released. Some friends of Beth’s started calling her the "Black Dahlia", thanks to her dark hair and back lacy clothing. The name stuck and Beth began to immerse herself into the glamorous persona that she had created -- and that may have led to her death!

Although she is remembered today as the "Black Dahlia", Elizabeth Short did not start out as a sexy vamp that "haunted" the nightclubs of Hollywood. She was born on July 29, 1924 in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. Her parents, Cleo and Phoebe Short, moved the family to Medford, a few miles outside of Boston, shortly after Elizabeth was born. Cleo Short was a man ahead of his time, making a prosperous living designing and building miniature golf courses. Unfortunately though, the Depression caught up with him in 1929 and he fell on hard times. Without a second thought, he abandoned his wife and five daughters and faked his suicide. His empty car was discovered near a bridge and the authorities believed that he had jumped into the river below.

Phoebe was left to deal with the bankruptcy and to raise the girls by herself. She worked several jobs, including as a bookkeeper and a clerk in a bakery shop, but most of the money came from public assistance. One day, she received a letter from Cleo, who was now living in California. He apologized for running out on his family and asked to come home. Phoebe refused his apology and would not allow him to come back.

Beth (known as Betty to her family and friends) grew up to be a very pretty girl, always looking older and acting more sophisticated then she really was. Everyone who knew her liked her and although she had serious problems with asthma, she was considered very bright and lively. She was also fascinated by the movies, which was her family’s main source of affordable entertainment. She found an escape at the theater that she couldn’t find in the day to day drudgery of ordinary life.

While she was growing up, Betty remained in touch with her father (once she knew that he was actually alive). They wrote letters back and forth and when she was older, he offered to have her come out to California and stay with him until she was able to find a job. Betty had worked in restaurants and movie houses in the past but she knew that if she went to California, she wanted to be a star. She packed up and headed out west to her father. At that time, Cleo was living in Vallejo and working at the Mare Island Naval Base. Betty hadn’t been in town for long before the relationship between she and her father became strained. He began to launch into tirades about her laziness, poor housekeeping and dating habits. Eventually, he threw her out and Betty (now Beth) was left to fend for herself.

Undaunted, she went to Camp Cooke and applied for a job as a cashier at the Post Exchange. It didn’t take long for the servicemen to notice the new cashier and she won the title of "Camp Cutie of Camp Cooke" in a beauty contest. They didn’t realize that the sweet romantic girl was emotionally vulnerable and was desperate to marry a handsome serviceman, preferably a pilot. She made no secret of wanting a permanent relationship with one of the men with whom she constantly flirted. The word soon got around that Beth was not an easy girl and pressure for more than just hand-holding kept Beth at home most nights. Several encounters made her uncomfortable at Camp Cooke and she left to stay with a girlfriend who lived near Santa Barbara.

During this time, Beth had her only run-in with the law. A group of friends that she was out with got rowdy in a restaurant and the owners called the police. Since Beth was underage, she was booked and fingerprinted, but never charged. A kind policewoman felt sorry for her and arranged for a trip back to Massachusetts. After spending some time at home, she came back to California, this time to Hollywood.

At the Hollywood Canteen, Beth met a pilot named Lieutenant Gordon Fickling and fell in love. He was exactly what she was looking for and she began making plans to ensnare him in matrimony. Unfortunately though, her plans were cut short when Fickling was shipped out to Europe.

Beth then took a few modeling jobs but discouraged, she went back east. She spent the holidays in Medford and then went to Miami, where she had relatives with whom she could live for awhile. Beth began dating servicemen, always with marriage as her goal, but fell in love again on New Year’s Eve 1945 with a pilot, Major Matt Gordon. A commitment was apparently made between them after he was sent to India.

Beth wrote to him constantly and Gordon remained in touch with her. As a pre-engagement gift, he gave Beth a gold wristwatch that was set with diamonds and he spoke about her (and their engagement) to family and friends. Best of all, as far as Beth was concerned, he respected her wishes about waiting until their honeymoon to consummate their love. They would get married and have a proper honeymoon, he promised her, after he returned from overseas. One has to wonder how Beth planned to deal with the physical problems they would encounter once the relationship turned sexual, but perhaps she was too caught up in the moment to worry about it at that time. Beth went back home to Massachusetts and got a job, dreaming of her October wedding. Her friends often commented on how happy she was and after the war ended in Europe, she became ecstatic about Gordon returning home. Then came the dreaded telegram from Gordon’s mother...

As soon as it arrived, Beth tore the message open, believing that it was about plans for the upcoming wedding. Instead, Mrs. Gordon had written: "Received word War Department. Matt killed in plane crash on way home from India. Our deepest sympathy is with you. Pray it isn't true."

Sadly, it was true and we are only left to imagine what Beth’s life might have been like if Matt Gordon had returned home alive. The so-called "Black Dahlia" would have never come to be....

Gordon’s death left Beth a little unbalanced. After a period of mourning in which she spent telling people that she and Matt had been married and that their baby had died in childbirth, she began to pick up the pieces of her old life and started contacting her Hollywood friends. One of those was former boyfriend Gordon Fickling, who Beth saw as a possible replacement for her dead fiancée. They began to write back and forth to one another and then got together briefly in Chicago when he was in town for a couple of days. Soon, Beth was in love with him again. She agreed to come to Long Beach and be with him, happy and excited once again. A short time later, Beth was back in California.

Her excitement over the new relationship didn’t last long. She had to stay in a hotel that was miles from the base where Fickling was stationed and he constantly pressured Beth for sex. She had no intention of giving herself to a man except in marriage, she told a friend, and Fickling had no intention of making such a commitment. She began dating other men and when Fickling found out, he ended their relationship.

In December 1946, Beth took up "temporary" residence in San Diego with a young woman named Dorothy French. She was a counter girl at the Aztec Theater, which stayed open all night, and after an evening show, she found Beth sleeping in one of the seats. Beth told her that she had left Hollywood because work was hard to find due to the actor’s strikes that were going on. Dorothy felt sorry for her and offered her a place to stay at her mother’s home. She meant that Beth could stay for a few days, but she ended up sleeping on the French’s couch for more than a month.

As usual, she did nothing to contribute to the household and she continued her late-night partying and dating. One of the men she dated was Robert "Red" Manley, a salesman from L.A. with a pregnant young wife at home. He admitted being attracted to Beth, but never claimed to have slept with her. They saw each other on an off for a few weeks and then Beth asked him for a ride back to Hollywood. He agreed and on January 8 picked her up from the French house and paid for a hotel room for her that night. They went out together to a couple of different nightspots and returned back to the motel. He slept on the bed, while Beth, complaining that she didn’t feel well, slept in a chair.

Red had a morning appointment but came back to pick her up around noon. She told him that she was going back home to Boston but first she was going to meet her married sister at the Biltmore Hotel in Hollywood. Manley drove her back to Los Angeles. He had an appointment at the home of his employer that evening at 6:30, so he didn’t wait around for Beth’s sister to arrive. She was making phone calls in the hotel lobby when he saw her last -- becoming, along with the hotel employees, the last person to see Beth Short alive.

As far as the police could discover, only the killer ever saw her after that. She vanished for six days from the Biltmore before her body was found in the empty lot.

The investigation into the Black Dahlia’s murder was the highest profile crime in Hollywood of the 1940’s. The police were constantly harassed by the newspapers and the public for results. Hundreds of suspects were questioned. Because it was considered a sex crime, the usual suspects and perverts were rounded up and interrogated. Beth’s friends and acquaintances were questioned as the detectives tried to reconstruct her final days and hours. Every lead that seemed hopeful ended up leading nowhere and the cops were further hampered by the lunatics and crazed confessions that were still pouring in.

As the investigators traced Beth’s activities, they discovered their strongest suspect, Red Manley. He became the chief target of the investigation. The LAPD put him through grueling interrogations and even administered two different polygraph tests, both of which he passed. He was released a couple of days later but the strain on him was so great that he later suffered a nervous breakdown.

While the police worked frantically, Beth’s mother made the trip to Los Angeles to claim her daughter’s body. Her father, who had not seen her since 1943, refused to identify her. Sadly, Phoebe Short had learned of her daughter’s death from a newspaper reporter who had called her, using the pretext that Beth had won a beauty contest and the paper wanted some background information about her. Once he had gleaned as much information as he could, he informed her that Beth had actually been murdered.

A few days after Beth’s body was found, a mysterious package appeared at the offices of the Los Angeles “Examiner”. A note that had been cut and pasted from newspaper lettering said "Here is the Dahlia’s Belongings.... Letter to Follow". Inside of the small package was Beth’s social security card, birth certificate, photographs with various servicemen, business cards and claim checks for suitcases she had left at the bus depot. Another item was an address book that belonged to club owner Mark Hansen. The address book had several pages torn out.

The police attempted to lift fingerprints off the items but found that all of it had been washed in gasoline to remove any trace of evidence. The detectives then began the overwhelming task of tracking down everyone in the address book and while Mark Hansen and a few others were singled out for interrogation, nothing ever came of it. In addition, the promised "letters to follow" arrived but contained no solid clues

The investigation stalled once again although Aggie Underwood, an aggressive crime reporter for the "Herald-Express", urged the detectives to follow-up on the murder of a young socialite named Georgette Bauerdorf, which had occurred a few years before. Aggie believed the murder was connected to that of Beth Short. The two women had known one another from the Hollywood Canteen and Georgette had been strangled and raped before being dumped into a bathtub face down. Investigators surmised that Beth had been killed and then washed and severed in half over a bathtub.

The Bauerdorf case had never been solved and was under the jurisdiction of the sheriff’s department. The investigation had died when deputies were unable to locate a "tall soldier" who had dated Georgette. She had reportedly been frightened by him and had stopped seeing him. Investigators suspected that he was involved in her death but the links were never made between her death and that of Beth Short. Jurisdictional problems kept the two departments from working together and Aggie Underwood was ordered off the story by William Randolph Hearst, the publisher of the newspaper. As a friend of the wealthy Bauerdorf family, he didn’t want the sordid details of the girl’s murder stirred up again. This may have been a tragic misstep, as Georgette's car had been found abandoned not far from where Beth's body was eventually discovered.

Not surprisingly, the leads in the Black Dahlia case came to dead ends and the investigation fizzled, then came to a halt. The Short murder and the murder of Georgette Bauerdorf remain unsolved today, although it’s possible that a suspect did finally emerge. The possible killer first came to the attention of John St. John, a respected investigator for the LAPD who eventually took over the Dahlia case. St. John had worked many of the city’s most notorious murders and was the basis of the book and television series "Jigsaw John". He had been in charge of the Dahlia case for about a year when a confidential informant came to him with a tape recording that implicated the suspect in the murder. The suspect had also shown the informant some photos and personal items that he claimed had belonged to the Black Dahlia.

The suspect turned out to be a tall, thin man with a pronounced limp who went by the name of Arnold Smith. On the recording, Smith claimed that a character named "Al Morrison" was the violent sexual deviant who had killed and mutilated Beth Short. St. John suspected that Arnold Smith and Al Morrison were actually the same person!

The tape was a chilling and detailed account of how Beth had come to Al Morrison’s Hollywood hotel room because she didn’t have anywhere else to stay. According to Smith, Beth refused both liquor and sex with Morrison and became upset when he drove her to a house on East 31st Street near San Pedro and Trinity Streets. Here, he assaulted her and prevented her from escaping by beating her into submission. Even though Beth fought back, he was able to overwhelm her with his strength. While she was on the floor, Morrison stated that he planned to sodomize her and Beth began struggling once again. This time, he hit her so hard that she passed out. The tape then went on the describe how Morrison had gotten a paring knife, a large butcher knife and some rope and had returned to the room to find Beth conscious again. She tried to scream, but he stuffed her underpants into her mouth and tied her up. While she was naked and bound, he began jabbing her over and over again with the knives, cutting and slashing her. One of the lacerations even extended both sides of her mouth and across her face. By this time, the girl was dead.

Morrison then laid boards across the bathtub and cut Beth in half with the butcher knife, letting the blood drain into the tub. He wrapped the two pieces of the body in a tablecloth and a shower curtain and put it into the trunk of his car. From there, he drove to the vacant lot and left the body to be found later that morning.

St. John discovered that this same suspect, Al Morrison, had also come to the attention of Detective Joel Lesnick of the Sheriff’s Department for the murder of Georgette Bauerdorf. He was thought to be the "tall soldier" that she had been dating. Lesnick had learned that both Al Morrison and Arnold Smith were aliases for a man named Jack Anderson Wilson, a tall and lanky alcoholic with a crippled leg and a record for sex offenses and robbery. Lesnick guessed that "as the years went on, Smith's ego drew him closer, not to confessing, but wanting to tell someone in a roundabout way what he got away with primarily through luck."

After hearing the record of events on the tape recordings, St. John became determined to track down "Arnold Smith". He checked into the story of "Al Morrison", the alleged violent pervert, and could find no proof that he existed, thus confirming the idea that Smith (Jack Wilson) was actually the killer. St. John began to leave no stone unturned in his pursuit to link Jack Wilson to Elizabeth Short.

In the midst of the investigation, word came that the press had gotten wind of the fact that a new suspect had emerged in the Dahlia case. Even after all of the years (at this point the mid-1980’s) that had passed, interest in the case was still strong. At this point, St. John realized that it was imperative that he move quickly before Wilson / Smith became spooked. The informant did not know where Smith lived, but left a message for him in a café. Several messages were left but Smith never returned them, possibly because he got wind of police surveillance of the restaurant. Finally, the informant received a reply and a meeting was set between he and Smith. It was set for a few days later and at that time, the police planned to pick Smith up for questioning.

Unfortunately, just before the meeting took place, Smith passed out while smoking in his bed at the Holland Hotel, where he was staying. He was burned to death in the flames, destroying the photos and belongings that supposedly belonged to Beth Short -- along with all hope that her murder would ever be solved.

A short time after Wilson’s body was released to the county for cremation, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office was presented with a file on the matter. The prosecutor’s office summed up the case by saying: "The case cannot be officially closed due to the death of the individual considered a suspect. While the documentation appears to link this individual with the homicide of Elizabeth Short, his death, however, precludes the opportunity of an interview to obtain from him the corroboration…Therefore, any conclusion as to his criminal involvement is circumstantial, and unfortunately, the suspect cannot be charged or tried, due to his demise. However, despite this inconclusiveness, the circumstantial evidence is of such a nature that were this suspect alive, an intensive inquiry would be recommended. And depending upon the outcome of such an inquiry.... it is conceivable that Jack Wilson might have been charged as a suspect in the murder of Elizabeth Short -- also known as the Black Dahlia."

Over the years, other suspects for the murder have surfaced as well, along with a number of false confessions and ridiculous stories and theories. Because of the lurid and mysterious nature of the crime, it seems to be one of those sorts of cases that everyone has an opinion about. In addition, the initial investigation of the case revealed a number of suspects that all eventually played out over time. Aside from the Wilson / Smith suspect, no other really strong suspects have emerged. There have been some interesting theories within the police department to the possibility that the killer was the same culprit in the Cleveland Torso Murders a few years before.

During the original investigation, investigators ran across a number of leads and questioned many suspects, including nightclub owner Mark Hansen and Red Manley, who were later cleared. Red simply had the bad luck to get involved with a woman who turned out to be as complex as Beth -- and who ended up dead. Manley was given the "third degree" at police headquarters and only released after a polygraph test. He was exonerated but the case never really ended for him. Suspicion and mental problems plagued him for the rest of his life and in 1954, his wife had him committed to the Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino. Reporter Will Fowler would later state that the case "destroyed their life."

There were also many anonymous calls that turned up, including one that stated that Beth's killers had been two police officers and many false confessions. In at least three cases, landlords reported "suspicious behavior" on the part of tenants they were trying to evict and a woman in Barstow, California gave false information in hopes of getting back at two old boyfriends who had jilted her. Other time-wasting confessions included a pharmacist who told police that he "knew how to cut a body in half". He initially claimed to have killed Beth but later admitted that he "was kidding". A woman also confessed that Beth had stolen her boyfriend, so she had killed her. When she was unable to pick her out of a photo array however, it was confirmed that she had made the whole thing up.

One, more promising, lead involved an Army corporal and combat veteran named Joseph Dumais. He was reported to the military police by another soldier, who had argued with Dumais over money. After a 42-day furlough, the corporal was found with blood all over his clothing and a stack of newspaper clippings about the murder. He had little memory of what he may have done during his furlough. He told investigators: "It is possible that I could have committed the murder. When I get drunk I get rough with women." Dumais was sent to a psychiatrist but was cleared of killing Beth.

Interest in the case continued for years and it has appeared in many books and periodicals over time. However, it was really not until 1987 (the 40th anniversary of the murder) and the release of James Ellroy's excellent novel about the murder, The Black Dahlia, that interest in the case was revived and the quest for the killer of Beth Short was renewed. Since that time, many theories have been created and new books have appeared on the market -- each, of course, claiming to have the case solved. Much of the research that has been done, notably by writers like John Gilmore and Larry Harnisch, has been thorough and compelling, but others fall far short in making a convincing case for a solution.

So, who killed the Black Dahlia? Author and former head of the FBI's behavioral sciences unit, John Douglas, had his own theories, based on his own past experiences profiling serial and dangerous killers. After reviewing the coroner's inquest, autopsy files and cases records, Douglas described Beth's killer as a white man, no younger than his late 20's and possibly older, with a high school education. He lived alone, worked with his hands and was comfortable with a knife and blood, like a butcher or slaughterhouse worker. He was also familiar with prostitutes and was compulsive, patient and deliberate. He was also a heavy drinker and under financial stress. He spent several days with the victim and, when drunk, let his personal stress and the alcohol combine into a murderous rage. He cut Beth's body in half to make transportation easier but also chose mutilation to make a personal statement about the rage that he felt towards her. Severing the body both dehumanized and defemininized her. Douglas also believed that the killer chose the dump site for a reason, as in a personal connection to the neighborhood, perhaps because of some financial setback caused by the fact that the construction in the area was halted because of the war.

Douglas believes that if the murder had been committed today, it would have been solved. He states that the killer would have given himself away by his behavior after the crime, when he sobered up. He also theorized that he might have become paranoid, fearing that he had left some clue behind, and would have become obsessed with the case, reading all of the newspaper coverage of it and collecting clippings. It's also likely that he would have kept some souvenir of the crime and when he became convinced that he would not be found out, he might taunt the police and newspapers with knowledge he had that no one else did. This might explain the letters and the items of Beth's that were mailed to the newspapers.

But why no other killings? Douglas believed that perhaps the killer was never under the same sort of stress again or perhaps he died. Most likely though, is that the murderer destroyed himself or was committed to a mental institution. Or perhaps simply faded into obscurity, sure that he would never be caught.

And while Douglas created a credible personality of the killer, there have been other claims made as well. The case was first analyzed by author Leslie Charteris, the creator of "The Saint", who wrote about the case just three weeks after it occurred -- but there have been many to follow. The story was written up by Jack Webb, creator of "Dragnet", in his book The Badge, in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon series and in Will Fowler's The Reporters.

The story has also appeared in countless books on unsolved mysteries and true crimes and there are entire websites devoted to Beth and her murder, including Pamela Hazelton's documentation of the crime.

Two relatively recent entries to try and solve the Black Dahlia murder include Black Dahlia Avenger and Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer, in which both writers blame their deceased fathers for the crime. The 1995 book by Janice Knowlton and respected crime author Michael Newton, Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer, was written after repressed memories surfaced for Knowlton. As an alleged victim of incest and child abuse, he kept her memories of her life with father -- and the murder of "Aunt Betty" -- below the surface for years. The book presents several well-known facts about the case but there is nothing to substantiate the story that her father was the killer other than the author's claims. Black Dahlia Avenger is unfortunately just as flawed. This book had many excited when it learned that the author, Steve Hodel, was a veteran police detective but his initial evidence in the case turned out to be some photographs that he found in his late father's estate that he believed were of Elizabeth Short. I wish that I could say that I thought the photos were genuine but I can't. The book is a well-written and well-researched investigation into the past of Hodel's father -- and his likely crimes -- but I don't think it a presents a great case that his father killed Beth Short.

Two of the best bodies of research that I have found into the case have been done by authors John Gilmore and Larry Harnisch. Gilmore is the author of the bo0k Severed, which I have always found to be one of the best and most complete investigations of the murder. Gilmore was the first to write about several aspects of the case that have since been taken for granted, including that Beth's sexual organs were undeveloped and that the Wilson / Smith scenario was the most likely solution for the crime. And while this book remains very readable (and recommended) it has, since it's release, been criticized for many errors. To be honest, I haven't really found them but then I have never claimed to be an expert on the case, as so many others claim to be. To this date, I continue to find Severed to be the most comprehensive and credible book on the case so far.

As mentioned though, some pretty compelling research has also been done by reporter Larry Harnisch into this case. Using John Douglas' profile of the killer, Harnisch has managed to track down not only a suspect who fits it but a doctor who lived in the neighborhood where Beth's body was found but who also had a connection to Beth's sister and by extension, to Beth herself. To this date, Harnisch has not published a book on the case (although I hope that he does) but you can read more about his theories and information on his website.

But no matter the number of theories, books and documentaries on the case, to this date it remains unsolved. No matter who considers themselves an expert on the case and who does not, the truth is that no one was ever charged for the murder of Elizabeth Short and, as far as we know, her death has never been avenged. She remains an elusive mystery from the dark side of Hollywood -- and the even darker side of the American landscape.

Ed Gein - - - WISCONSIN'S "PSYCHO"

2008-06-11T01:33:00.001-07:00

WISCONSIN'S "PSYCHO"

The Deviant Life & Times of Ed Gein

A beautiful blond undresses and steps into the shower, only to be attacked a few moments later by a man in woman's clothing, who stabs her to death...

Lost teenagers stumble onto a terrifying family of cannibals who dress in human skin and create furniture and ornaments from human bone and flesh...

A vicious serial killer kidnaps and slaughters young girls so that he can create a suit from human skin and thus, transform himself into a woman...

Sound familiar? Of course it does. These are portions of the plots from three chilling films called PSYCHO, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. They are three films after which you can leave the darkened theater and tell yourself "thank god, it's only a movie". Or can you? Because, you see, elements of each of these blood-curdling films actually occurred. In real life though, the killer's name was not Norman Bates, Leatherface or Jame Gumb -- but Edward Gein.

Ed Gein grew up on a farm a few miles outside of the town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. His father, George, was a hard-luck farmer with little talent for working the soil and with a taste for alcohol. He also had a tendency to be quick with his fists after he had been drinking, but as rough as he was, he was no match for his wife, Augusta.

Augusta had been raised in a fiercely religious home and with this sort of influence, developed into a raving opponent of anything related to sex. All around her, she saw nothing but filth and depravity and how she managed to become pregnant with her two sons, Eddie and Henry, remains a mystery. Shortly after Ed's birth, she forced her husband to leave the "sinkhole of filth" called LaCrosse and moved to what she believed to be a more righteous location, Plainfield. However, this small, God-fearing town turned out to be no better, at least in Augusta's eyes. She considered the place to be a "hellhole" and kept her two sons on the farm and away from anything she considered dangerous or of a sinful influence, namely whorish women and the wickedness of carnal love.

In 1940, George Gein dropped dead from a heart attack. Most likely, he was not sorry to go. The years spent with Augusta had undoubtedly taken their toll on him. The two boys were left alone with their mother and soon Ed was even deeper under her terrible spell. Henry however, attempted to break away and have a normal life, but his brother would have nothing to do with it. Henry's rebelliousness would have a price though. In 1944, he was found dead on the Gein property. It was reported that he had suffered a heart attack while trying to put out a brush fire, though this did not explain the bruises discovered on the back of his head.

Ed finally had his mother all to himself, although a year later, Augusta had a stroke and was confined to her bed. Ed tended to her day and night, although even his constant attentions were found lacking. She screamed and cajoled him at all hours, calling him a weakling and a failure. He would never be able to survive without her, she constantly railed at him. Then at other times, Augusta would call him to her side and allow Eddie to crawl into bed with her. She would whisper and speak softly to him and allow him to stay beside her throughout the night. Ed prayed that his mother would not die, would never leave him to face the world alone.

The Gein farmhouse near Plainfield (Wide World)

Augusta died in December 1945 after suffering another, more serious stroke. Ed Gein, now 39 years old, was left alone to fend for himself. It was at this point that he be

gan his descent into dark and unfathomable madness. For some time, no one seemed to notice. Even in a town as small as Plainfield, Ed Gein was a loner and rarely ventured off the farm. Hidden behind the ramshackle walls of his old farm house, he only appeared in town when he needed to

run an errand, perform some handyman chores or stop for an occasional beer at Mary Hogan's tavern. No one seemed to think that he was any stranger than before -- he had always been an odd little man, in need of a bath, but he seemed no different than he had before his mother's death.

ppeared, Ed began kidding that she was staying overnight at his house. Mary had vanished from the roadhouse, leaving nothing but a puddle of blood behind, and many thought Gein's jokes about the poor woman were tasteless. Even the stories about the strange things going on at Ed's house didn't faze

anyone. Some local kids, peeking in Gein's windows, spread rumors that they had seen shrunken human heads in his living room. Ed laughed and explained that his cousin had served in the South Seas during World War II and had sent the heads to Ed as souvenirs.

Old Ed Gein would never hurt anybody, it was thought. He was a strange little guy who didn't even like the sight of blood. He wouldn't even go deer hunting with the other fellows in town. That's what everyone in Plainfield said -- until Bernice Worden disappeared.

She vanished on November 16, 1957. Late that afternoon, Frank Worden returned to town from an empty day of deer hunting and stopped by the hardware store that was owned and operated by his mother, Bernice, a 58 year-old widow. Strangely, his mother was not there. She had left, leaving the door unlocked and the back door open. Frank then discovered something terrifying -- a trail of blood leading from the storefront to the back door

. A quick search revealed a receipt that had been left behind. The receipt was for a half-gallon of antifreeze. It had been made out to Ed Gein.

Frank notified the police and they went to Gein's farm house to question him about Mrs. Worden's whereabouts. When they arrived, they came upon the body of Bernice in the summer kitchen behind the house. She was naked, hanging by her heels from an overhead pulley. She had been beheaded and disemboweled -- and dressed out like a butchered deer.

The stunned and sickened officers immediately called for reinforcements. A short time later, more than a dozen lawmen were combing the farm and exploring the contents of what would become known as Ed Gein's "house of horrors". What they found that night was like nothing that had ever been recorded in the annals of American crime.

(Above) One of the rooms that once belonged to Augusta Gein. Ed sealed it off from the squalor in the rest of the house. (Right) The horrific state of Gein's kitchen.
(Life Magazine © Time Inc.)

Soup bowls had been made from the sawed-off tops of human skulls. Chairs had been upholstered in human skin. Lamp shades had been fashioned from flesh, giving off an eerie and putrid glow. A box was discovered that contained nothing but human noses. A belt had been made from female nipples. A shade pull had been decorated with a pair of woman's lips. A shoe box under a bed contained a collection of dried, female genitalia. The faces of nine women, carefully stuffed and mounted, were hanging on one wall.... and there was much more, including a bracelet of skin, a drum made from a coffee can and human flesh, and more. A shirt of human skin, complete with breasts, had been fashioned from the tanned torso of a middle-aged woman. Gein would later confess that he often put the shirt on at night and pretended to be his mother.

To make matters worse, the refrigerator turned out to be stocked with frozen human organs and a human heart was found in a pan on the stove. The local sheriff estimated that the various body parts added up to 15 women, maybe more. Around 4:30 in the morning, after hours of sifting through the hideous and horrifying debris, the investigators discovered a bloody burlap sack. Inside of it was a freshly severed head. Inserted into the ears were large nails connected with twine. The head belonged to Bernice Worden. Gein had planned to hang it on the wall as a decoration.

During the many hours of confession that followed, Gein admitted to the murders of two women, Bernice Worden and the tavern owner, Mary Hogan (although his confession to the Hogan murder would not come until later). The rest of the gruesome remains in the house had been scavenged from the local cemetery. For the past 12 years, following the death of his mother, Gein had been stealing into the Plainfield cemetery at night and robbing graves. His macabre collection had been gathered from the bodies of the dead. In his quest, Gein had enlisted the aid of a dim-witted farmer named Gus, who had helped him to dig up the bodies. Once back at the house though, the work had all been Ed's. When Gus had been committed to an old-age home, Gein became desperate for fresh trophies. At this point, he was driven to murder.

For months after Ed was taken away, neighbor boys threw rocks at his abandoned farm house. To many, the building was seen as a symbol of evil and depravity. The place was avoided at all costs. Eventually, notice was posted that the contents of the house and the farm itself would be auctioned off. The towns people were in an uproar, but little could be done about it -- or so it seemed. On the night of March 20, 1958, Gein's home was mysteriously set on fire and it burned to the ground. Arson was suspected but no matter how it had burned, the people of Plainfield were delighted to see it gone. When Gein, who was incarcerated at the Central State Hospital, learned of the loss, he only uttered three words in response. "Just as well," he said.

Some would insist that even greater horrors may have vanished in the fire, along with the house. The destruction of the home assured many Plainfield residents that their town would not become a showplace for the madness of Ed Gein. However, it did not stop the procession of cars or the curiosity seekers who came to witness the auction of the remaining property. Much of the rusting machinery was purchased by scrap dealers and the land itself was sold to a Sun Prairie real estate developer named Emden Schey. Within months, he would raze the charred remains of the building and re-forest the property with more than 60,000 trees.

The only oddity from the sale came with the auction for Ed Gein's car, which he had been driving on the day of Bernice Worden's murder. This item started a bidding war with 14 different people competing. In the end, the 1949 Ford sedan sold for the amazing sum of $760. The buyer was a mysterious bidder identified variously as "Koch Brothers", "Cook Brothers" and even "Kook Brothers" from Rothschild, Wisconsin. The buyer later turned out to be an enterprising carnival sideshow operator named Bunny Gibbons from Rockford, Illinois. The "Ed Gein Ghoul Car" made its first appearance in July 1958 at the Outgamie County Fair in Seymour, Wisconsin. It was displayed in a canvas tent with huge sign on it, painted to say:

SEE THE CAR THAT HAULED THE DEAD FROM THEIR GRAVES!
ED GEIN'S CRIME CAR! $1,000 REWARD IF IT'S NOT TRUE!

More than 2,000 people paid a 25 cent admission to see the car over a two-day period.

Word spread of the macabre attraction and controversy erupted. Plainfield residents, along with officials for the Wisconsin Association for Mental Health were outraged. Gibbons however, most likely thrilled with the free publicity, was unfazed by the uproar. Soon though, his display began to run into trouble. At the Washington County Fair in Slinger, Wisconsin, the death car had been on display only a few hours before the sheriff arrived and closed Gibbons down. Soon, county fairs all across the state banned the attraction and Gibbons headed south to Illinois, where he hoped to find more open-minded (and perhaps ghoulish) crowds. Whatever became of the car is unknown.

This was not the last that anyone had heard of Ed Gein. Back in 2002, I was contacted by a man named John Fischer, who had worked for the Wisconsin State Crime Lab in 1959-1960. John was a graduating senior at the University of Wisconsin and worked at the lab for a year under Dexter Haney, the photo lab chief. John first met Ed Gein in 1960 when he went to work at the lab one day and recognized several sheriff's deputies from Waushara County standing around a short man that he didn't know. John inquired of Charlie Wilson, the lab director, as to who the man was and he told him that the short man was Ed Gein. He had been brought into the lab and hooked up to the polygraph machine to try and get him to confess to Mary Hogan's murder. Her heirs wanted to settle her estate and couldn't as long as she was still listed as a "missing person".

John told Wilson that when he had come in, Gein had looked at him and had winked. Charlie knew that he was soon leaving the lab for a position in Washington D.C. and joked, "I think he likes you. Do you think Washington is far enough away?"

John went on to tell me that the "trophies" that had been removed from the house in Plainfield were stored at the Crime Lab in a closed room under a stairwell. There were of too bizarre a nature, John explained, to keep in the regular evidence enclosure. "I finally got used to the idea that heads and other body parts were on the other side of my photo darkroom," he told me, "even when the room was bathed in red or amber safelights."

In June 1960, the Lab got clearance to dispose of the evidence and remains. The Lab wanted to incinerate all of it but the word came down that since some of the remains were Catholic, they could not be burned. Instead, a wooden box was constructed and the remains received a common burial -- closing a chapter in the horrific Ed Gein case forever.

By the time Ed Gein died in 1984, he had become a legend even though he spent the rest of his days locked in an institution. He died on July 26, 1984 and his body was taken to Plainfield and buried in the local cemetery. As far as Ed Gein was concerned, he was probably right back where he belonged.

But his story did not end there, for Ed Gein lives on still . Even during his lifetime, Gein had become a creature of nightmarish myth, thanks to local legends, stories and his Central Wisconsin reputation as the "Mad Butcher of Plainfield". This dark creature of children's imaginations was immortalized first in 1960 by director Alfred Hitchcock in his film, PSYCHO. However, the film had been inspired by a book of the same name by Wisconsin author Robert Bloch, who had fashioned the "bare bones" of the story from the Ed Gein case.

Gein returned (in a fashion) to the big screen again in 1974 with a low-budget cult film called DERANGED. The story is the effective and chilling look into the private world of a maniac. Gein is disguised here as a killer named Ezra Cobb who keeps his mother's mummified body when she dies, brings home other bodies to keep her company and then turns to murder when he feels the urge to make suits of skin.

That same year (1974), Gein's influence was felt again in the THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, directed by Tobe Hooper, who had been exposed to the real-life case by Wisconsin relatives when he was a boy. This disturbing film is considered a horror classic and portrays an entire family of lunatics and cannibals who delight in wearing human skin and creating bizarre adornments from the bodies of their victims.

Gein's story lived on in 1991 with the release of the Academy Award winning film THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Based on the book by Thomas Harris, the story featured a serial killer called "Buffalo Bill," so-named because he skinned his victims. He was attempting to make a suit of human skin and turn himself into a woman.

The Ed Gein story has also inspired documentary films, plays and even a comic book. The case was unlike anything else in the history of America, and some would say that it began a new era -- creating a thirst for death, depravity and a voyeuristic fascination with the actions of the killers among us. Who can say? Regardless, the "strange little man" from Plainfield, Wisconsin has never been forgotten and its sure that his presence will continue to be felt for many, many years to come.

Ed Gein - - - WISCONSIN'S "PSYCHO"

2008-06-11T01:33:00.000-07:00

WISCONSIN'S "PSYCHO"
The Deviant Life & Times of Ed Gein

A beautiful blond undresses and steps into the shower, only to be attacked a few moments later by a man in woman's clothing, who stabs her to death...

Lost teenagers stumble onto a terrifying family of cannibals who dress in human skin and create furniture and ornaments from human bone and flesh...

A vicious serial killer kidnaps and slaughters young girls so that he can create a suit from human skin and thus, transform himself into a woman...

The Gein farmhouse near Plainfield (Wide World)

Augusta died in December 1945 after suffering another, more serious stroke. Ed Gein, now 39 years old, was left alone to fend for himself. It was at this point that he began his descent into dark and unfathomable madness. For some time, no one seemed to notice. Even in a town as small as Plainfield, Ed Gein was a loner and rarely ventured off the farm. Hidden behind the ramshackle walls of his old farm house, he only appeared in town when he needed to run an errand, perform some handyman chores or stop for an occasional beer at Mary Hogan's tavern. No one seemed to think that he was any stranger than before -- he had always been an odd little man, in need of a bath, but he seemed no different than he had before his mother's death.

Looking back, Ed's oddities stood out in hindsight. Local folks would later recall his barroom discussions of articles that he had read in the pulpy men's magazines, stories of Nazi atrocities, island headhunters and sex-change operations. His jokes seemed to be a little on the cruel side as well. When Mary Hogan, the oversized tavern owner, suddenly disappeared, Ed began kidding that she was staying overnight at his house. Mary had vanished from the roadhouse, leaving nothing but a puddle of blood behind, and many thought Gein's jokes about the poor woman were tasteless. Even the stories about the strange things going on at Ed's house didn't faze anyone. Some local kids, peeking in Gein's windows, spread rumors that they had seen shrunken human heads in his living room. Ed laughed and explained that his cousin had served in the South Seas during World War II and had sent the heads to Ed as souvenirs.

(Above) One of the rooms that once belonged to Augusta Gein. Ed sealed it off from the squalor in the rest of the house. (Right) The horrific state of Gein's kitchen.
(Life Magazine © Time Inc.)

Some would insist that even greater horrors may have vanished in the fire, along with the house.

The destruction of the home assured many Plainfield residents that their town would not become a showplace for the madness of Ed Gein. However, it did not stop the procession of cars or the curiosity seekers who came to witness the auction of the remaining property. Much of the rusting machinery was purchased by scrap dealers and the land itself was sold to a Sun Prairie real estate developer named Emden Schey. Within months, he would raze the charred remains of the building and re-forest the property with more than 60,000 trees.

SEE THE CAR THAT HAULED THE DEAD FROM THEIR GRAVES!
ED GEIN'S CRIME CAR!
$1,000 REWARD IF IT'S NOT TRUE!

More than 2,000 people paid a 25 cent admission to see the car over a two-day period.

Andrei Chikatilo History

2008-06-08T02:16:00.000-07:00

Andrei Chikatilo

Andrei Chikatilo confessed to 56 murders when he was eventually caught in 1990. The brutal killer preyed on children and young vagrants, eating intimate parts of their bodies.

Biography

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born on 16th October 1936 in Yablochnoye, a village in the heart of rural Ukraine, within the USSR. During the 1930s, the Ukraine was known as the "Breadbasket" of the Soviet Union, and the policies of communism, realized through Stalin's enforcement of agricultural collectivization, caused widespread hardship within the country, leading eventually to a famine that decimated the population. At the time of his birth, the effects of the famine were still widely felt, and his early childhood was influenced by the deprivation, made worse still when the USSR entered the war against Germany, causing the Ukraine to be the subject of sustained bombing raids.

Early humiliation colored all his future sexual experiences, and cemented his association of sex with violence.

In addition to the external hardships, Chikatilo is believed to have suffered from hydrocephalus (or water on the brain) at birth, which caused him genital-urinary tract problems later in life, including bed-wetting into his late adolescence and, later, the inability to sustain an erection, although he was able to ejaculate. His home life was disrupted by his father's conscription into the war against Germany, where he was captured, held prisoner, and then vilified by his countrymen for allowing himself to be captured, when he finally returned home. Such was the political control exercised in the Soviet Union at that time that the young Chikatilo suffered the consequences of his father's "cowardice", making him the focus of school bullying.

Painfully shy as a result of this, his only sexual experience during adolescence occurred, aged 15, when he is reported to have overpowered a young girl, ejaculating immediately during the brief struggle, for which he received even more ridicule. This humiliation colored all future sexual experiences, and cemented his association of sex with violence.

He failed his entrance exam to Moscow State University, and a spell of National Service was followed by a move to Rodionovo-Nesvetayevsky, a town near Rostov, in 1960, where he became a telephone engineer. His younger sister moved in with him and, concerned by his lack of success with the opposite sex, she engineered a meeting with a local girl, Fayina, whom he went on to marry in 1963. Despite his sexual problems, and lack of interest in conventional sex, they produced two children, and lived an outwardly normal family life. In 1971, a career change to school teacher was short-lived, when a string of complaints about indecent assaults on young children forced him to move from school to school, before he finally settled at a mining school in Shakhty, near Rostov.

Crimes

On 22nd December 1978, Chikatilo killed his first documented victim; 9 year old Lena Zakotnova was lured into an abandoned shed, where Chikatilo tried to rape her. Trying to control the struggling child, Chikatilo slashed her with a knife, ejaculating whilst doing so, confirming his psychological connection between violent death and sexual gratification that went on to typify all future attacks.

An eyewitness had seen Chikatilo with the victim, shortly before her disappearance, but his wife provided him with a cast-iron alibi that enabled him to evade any further police attention. A 25-year old, Alexsandr Kravchenko, with a previous rape conviction, was arrested and confessed to the crime under duress, probably as a result of extensive and brutal interrogation. He was tried for the killing of Lena Zakotnova, and executed in 1984.

Evidence of serial killing, or child abuse, was often suppressed by State-controlled media, in the interests of public order.

Perhaps as a result of his close brush with the law, there were no more documented victims for the next three years. Still dogged by claims of child abuse, Chikatilo found it impossible to find another teaching post, when he was made redundant from his mining school post, in early 1981. He took a job as a clerk for a raw materials factory in Rostov, where the travel involved with the position gave him unlimited access to a wide range of young victims, over the next 9 years.

On 3rd September 1981, Larisa Tkachenko, 17, became his next victim, strangled, stabbed and gagged with earth and leaves, to prevent her crying out. The brutal force afforded Chikatilo his sexual release, and he began to develop a pattern of attack that saw him focusing on young runaways of both sexes, whom he befriended at train stations and bus stops, before luring them into nearby forest areas, where he would attack them, attempt rape and use his knife, as a penis substitute, to mutilate them. In a number of cases he ate the sexual organs, or removed other body parts such as the tips of their noses or tongues. In the earliest cases, the common pattern was to inflict damage to the eye area, slashing across the sockets and removing the eyeballs in many cases, an act which Chikatilo later attributed to a belief that his victims kept an imprint of his face in their eyes, even after death.

At this time serial killers were a virtually unknown phenomenon in the Soviet Union, whether as a result of suppression of information, or wider cultural differences between Soviet and Western societies. Evidence of serial killing, or child abuse, was often suppressed by State-controlled media, in the interests of public order. The eye mutilation was a modus operandi distinct enough to allow for other cases to be linked, when the Soviet authorities finally admitted that they had a serial killer to contend with. As the body count mounted, rumors of foreign inspired plots, and werewolf attacks, became more prevalent, and public fear and interest grew, despite the lack of any media coverage.

In 1983 Moscow detective, Major Mikhail Fetisov, was seconded to Rostov to assume control of the investigation. He recognized that a serial killer might be on the loose, and assigned a specialist forensic analyst, Victor Burakov, to head the investigation in the Shakhty area. The investigation centered on known sex offenders, and the mentally ill, but such were the interrogation methods of the local police that they regularly solicited false confessions from prisoners, leaving Burakov skeptical of the majority of these "confessions". Progress was slow, especially as, at that stage, not all of the victim's bodies had been discovered, so the true body count was unknown to the police. With each body, the forensic evidence mounted, and police were convinced that the killer had the blood type AB, as evidenced by the semen samples collected from a number of crime scenes. Samples of identical grey hair were also retrieved.

When a further 15 victims were added during the course of 1984, police efforts were increased drastically, and they mounted massive surveillance operations that canvassed most local transport hubs. Chikatilo was arrested for behaving suspiciously at a bus station at this time, but again avoided suspicion on the murder charges, as his blood type did not match the suspect profile, but he was imprisoned for 3 months for a number of minor outstanding offences.

What was not realized at the time was that Chikatilo's actual blood type, type A, was different to the type found in his other bodily fluids (type AB), as he was a member of a minority group known as "non-secretors", whose blood type cannot be inferred by anything other than a blood sample. As police only had a sample of semen, and not blood, from the crime scenes, Chikatilo was able to escape suspicion of murder. Today's sophisticated DNA techniques are not subject to the same fallibility.

Following his release, Chikatilo found work as a traveling buyer for a train company, based in Novocherkassk, and managed to keep a low profile until August 1985, when he murdered two women in separate incidents.

At around the same time as these murders, Burakov, frustrated at the lack of positive progress, engaged the help of psychiatrist, Alexandr Bukhanovsky, who refined the profile of the killer, describing him as a "necro-sadist", or someone who achieves sexual gratification from the suffering and death of others. Bukhanovsky also placed the killer's age as between 45 and 50, significantly older than had been believed up to that point. Desperate to catch the killer, Burakov even interviewed a serial killer, Anatoly Slivko, shortly before his execution, in an attempt to gain some insight into his elusive serial killer.

Coinciding with this attempt to understand the mind of the killer, attacks seemed to dry up, and police suspected that their target might have stopped killing, been incarcerated for other crimes, or died. However, early in 1988, Chikatilo again resumed his killing, the majority occurring away from the Rostov area, and victims were no longer taken from local public transport outlets, as police surveillance of these areas continued. Over the next two years the body count increased by a further 19 victims, and it appeared that the killer was taking increasing risks, focusing primarily on young boys, and often killing in public places where the risk of detection was far higher.

The recently unfettered media of Gorbachev's Glasnost society placed enormous public pressure on police forces to catch the killer, and general police patrols were stepped up, with Burakov targeting likely areas with undercover police in an attempt to flush out the killer. Chikatilo evaded capture narrowly, on a couple of occasions, but on 6th November 1990, fresh from killing his final victim, Sveta Korostik, his suspicious behavior was noted by patrolling policemen at the station nearby, and his details were taken. His name was linked to his previous arrest in 1984, and he was placed under surveillance.

Arrest

Chikatilo was arrested on 20th November 1990, following more suspicious behavior, but he refused at first to confess to any of the killings. Burakov decided to allow the psychiatrist, Bukhanovski, who had prepared the original profile, to talk to Chikatilo, under the guise of trying to understand the mind of a killer from a scientific context. Chikatilo, clearly flattered by this approach, opened up to the psychiatrist, providing extensive details of all of his killings, and even leading police to the site of bodies previously undiscovered.

He claimed to have taken the lives of 56 victims, although only 53 of these could be independently verified. This figure was far in excess of the 36 cases that the police had initially attributed to their serial killer.

Trail

Having been declared sane and fit to stand trial, Chikatilo went to court on 14th April 1992, and throughout the trial he was held in an iron cage designed to keep him apart from the relatives of his many victims. Referred to in the media as "The Maniac", his behavior in court ranged from bored to manic, singing and talking gibberish; at one point he was even reported as having dropped his trousers, waving his genitals at the assembled crowd.

The judge appeared less than impartial, often overruling Chikatilo's defense lawyer, and it was clear that Chikatilo's guilt was a foregone conclusion. The trial lasted until August and, surprisingly, given the judge's bias, the verdict was not announced until two months later, on 15th October 1990, when Chikatilo was found guilty on 52 of the 53 murder charges, and sentenced to death for each of the murders.

Aftermath

Chikatilo's appeal centered around the claim that the psychiatric evaluation which had found him fit to stand trial was biased, but this process was unsuccessful and, 16 months later, he was executed by a shot to the back of the head, on 14th February 1994.

The psychiatrist who had been instrumental in his capture, Aleksandr Bukhanovski, went on to become a celebrated expert on sexual disorders and serial killers.

Mark F

Timeline

Born October 16, 1936

The Victims
Chikatilo confessed to killing 53 people, possibly more, between 1978 and 1990.

1978 - 1983: 14 Victims, including
December 1978 - Lena Zakotnova, 9
September 1981 - Larisa Tkachenko, 17
June 1982 - Lyuba Biryuk, 13 (First Male Victim)
December 1982 - Olga Stalmachenok
December 1982 - Laura Sarkisyan, 15
Summer 1983 - Igor Gudkov, 7
October 1983 - Vera Shyvkyn, 19
December 1983 - Sergei Markov, 14

1984: 15 Victims, including
March 1984 - Dmitri Ptashnikov, 10
May 1984 - Tanya Petrosan, 32
May 1984 - Sveta Petrosan
June 1984 - Lyudmila Alekseyeva, 17
December 1984 - Sergei Markov, 14

1985: 2 Victims

1988: 5 Victims, including
May 1988 - Zhenya Muratov
May 1988 - Aleksei Voronko, 9

1989: 8 Victims, including
March 1989 - Tanya Rhyshova
August 1989 - Elena Varga
August 1989 - Alexei Khobotov, 10

1990: 9 Victims, including
July 1990 - Viktor Petrov, 13
August 1990 - Ivan Fomin, 7
October 1990 - Vadim Gromov, 16
November 1990 - Viktor Tishchenko, 16
November 1990 - Sveta Korostik, 22

Arrested November 20, 1990

Trial April 14, 1992

Convicted October 15, 1992

Died February 14, 1994

THE MURDER CASTLE OF H.H. HOLMES #6

2008-06-08T02:00:00.000-07:00

On November 30, the judge passed a sentence of death. His case was appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, who affirmed the verdict, and the governor refused to intervene. Holmes was scheduled to die on May 7, 1896, just nine days before his 36th birthday.

By now, the details of the case had been made public and people were angry, horrified and fascinated, especially in Chicago, where most of the evil had occurred. Holmes had provided a lurid confession of torture and murder that appeared in newspapers and magazines, providing a litany of depravity that compares with the most insane killers of all time. Even if his story was embellished, the actual evidence of Holmes’ crimes ranks him as one of the country’s most active murderers.

He remained unrepentant though, even at the end. Just before his execution, he visited with two Catholic priests in his cell and even took communion with them, although refused to ask forgiveness for his crimes. He was led from his cell to the gallows and a black hood was placed over his head. The trap door opened beneath him and Holmes quickly dropped. His head snapped to the side, but his fingers clenched and his feet danced for several minutes afterward, causing many spectators to look away. Although the force of the fall had broken his neck, and the rope had pulled so tight that it had literally imbedded itself in his flesh, his heart continued to beat for nearly 15 minutes. He was finally declared dead at 10:25 a.m.

There were a couple of macabre legends associated with Holmes’ execution. One story claimed that a lightning bolt had ripped through the sky at the precise moment the rope had snapped his neck -- but this was not the strangest one. The most enduring supernatural legend of H.H. Holmes is that of the "Holmes Curse". The story began shortly after his execution, leading to speculation that his spirit did not rest in peace. Some believed that he was still carrying on his gruesome work from beyond the grave. And, even to the skeptical, some of the events that took place after his death are a bit disconcerting.

A short time after Holmes’ body was buried, under two tons of concrete, the first strange death occurred. The first to die was Dr. William K. Matten, a coroner’s physician who had been a major witness in the trial. He suddenly dropped dead from blood poisoning.

More deaths followed in rapid order, including that of the head coroner, Dr. Ashbridge, and the trial judge who had sentenced Holmes to death. Both men were diagnosed with sudden, and previously unknown, deadly illnesses. Next, the superintendent of the prison where Holmes had been incarcerated committed suicide. The reason for his taking his own life was never discovered. Then, the father of one of Holmes’ victims was horribly burned in a gas explosion and the remarkably healthy Pinkerton agent, Frank Geyer, suddenly became ill. Thankfully though, the diligent detective pulled through.

Not long after this however, the office of the claims manager for the insurance company that Holmes had cheated, caught fire and burned. Everything in the office was destroyed except for a framed copy of Holmes’ arrest warrant and two portraits of the killer. Many of those who were already convinced of a curse saw this as an ominous warning.

Several weeks after the hanging, one of the priests who prayed with Holmes before his execution was found dead in the yard behind his church. The coroner ruled the death as uremic poisoning but according to reports, he had been badly beaten and robbed. A few days later, Linford Biles, who had been jury foreman in the Holmes trial, was electrocuted in a bizarre accident involving the electrical wires above his house.

In the years that followed, others involved with Holmes also met with violent deaths, including the train robber, Marion Hedgepeth. He remained in prison after his informing on Holmes, although he had expected a pardon that never came. On the very day of Holmes’ execution, he was transferred to the Missouri State Prison to finish out his sentence. As time passed, Hedgepeth gained many supporters to his cause, including several newspapers who wrote of his role in getting Holmes prosecuted. In 1906, he finally got his pardon and was released.

Despite the claims that he had made about his rehabilitation, including that he spent each day in prison reading his bible, Hedgepeth was arrested in September 1907 for blowing up a safe in Omaha, Nebraska. He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to 10 more years in prison. He was released however when it was discovered that he was dying from tuberculosis. In spite of his medical condition, he assembled a new gang and at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1910, he attempted to rob a saloon in (of all places) Chicago. As he was placing the money from the till into a burlap bag, a policeman wandered into the place for no reason, realized that a robbery was taking place and opened fire on the thief. Hedgepeth was dead before he hit the floor.

Perhaps Holmes got his revenge after all....

I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing -- I was born with the "Evil One" standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since.
H.H. HOLMES

Credit : http://www.prairieghosts.com/holmes.html

THE MURDER CASTLE OF H.H. HOLMES #5

2008-06-08T01:55:00.001-07:00

A diagram that appeared in the Chicago Tribune offered readers a look inside of the "Murder Castle" and lurid illustrations of the crematory, the secret rooms, the quicklime pits and even a map that illustrated the lay-out of the menacing building.

Detectives devoted several weeks to searching and making a floor plan of the Castle. The bottom floor had been used by Holmes himself as a drug store, a candy store, a restaurant and a jewelry store. The third floor of the building had been divided into small apartments and guest rooms and apparently, had never been used.

The second floor however proved to be a labyrinth of narrow, winding passages with doors that opened to brick walls, hidden stairways, cleverly concealed doors, blind hallways, secret panels, hidden passages and a clandestine vault that was only a big enough for a person to stand in. The room was alleged to be a homemade "gas chamber", equipped with a chute that would carry a body directly into the basement. The investigators suddenly realized the implications of the iron-plated chamber when they found the single, scuffed mark of a footprint on the inside of the door. It was a small print that had been made by a woman who had attempted to escape the grim fate of the tiny room.

In addition to all of the bizarre additions to the floor, the second level also held 35 guest rooms. Half of them were fitted as ordinary sleeping chambers, and there were indications that they had been occupied by the various women who worked for Holmes, by tenants during the Fair or by the luckless females Holmes had seduced while waiting for an opportunity to kill them. Several of the other rooms were without windows or could be made air tight by closing the doors. Others were lined with sheet iron and asbestos with scorch marks on the walls, fitted with trap doors that led to smaller rooms beneath, or were equipped with lethal gas jets that could be used to suffocate or burn the unsuspecting occupants.

This floor also contained Holmes’ private apartment, consisting of a bedroom, a bath and two small chambers that were used as offices. The apartment was located at the front of the building, looking out over 63rd Street. In the floor of the bathroom, concealed under a heavy rug, the police found a trap door and a stairway that descended to a room about eight feet square. Two doors led off this chamber, one to a stairway that exited out onto the street and the other giving access to the chute that led down to the basement.

The "chamber of horrors" in the basement stunned the men even further. This subterranean chamber was located seven feet below the rest of the building and extended out under the sidewalk in front. Here, they found Holmes’ blood-spattered dissecting table, his gleaming surgical instruments, his macabre "laboratory" of torture devices, various jars of poison and even a wooden box that contained a number of female skeletons. Built into one of the walls was a crematorium, with a heavy iron grate to hold the fire and another grate, fitted with rollers, by which a body could be slid into the flames. The crematoriums still contained ash and portions of bone that had not burned in the intense heat. A search of the ashes also revealed a watch that had belonged to Minnie Williams, some buttons from a dress and several charred tintype photographs. Under the staircase, Geyer also found a ball made from women’s hair that had been carefully wrapped in cloth.

Buried in the floor, the police found a huge vat of corrosive acid and two quicklime pits, which were capable of devouring an entire body in a matter of hours. A loose pile of quicklime was also discovered in a small room that had been built into the corner. The naked footprint of woman was found embedded in the pile.

Dozens of human bones and several pieces of jewelry were found and could be traced to Holmes’ mistresses. A wood burning stove in the center of the basement contained scraps of cloth and Ned Connor was summoned to the castle to identify a bloody dress that had belonged to Julia. In a hole in the middle of the floor, more bones were found. After being examined by a physician, they were believed to be the bones of a small child between the ages of six and eight. The fate of Pearl Connor was also no longer in question.

On July 20, some city workers began excavating the cellar and started a tunnel underneath 63rd Street. The hazy smell of gas hung in the air and as the men tore away one wall, they discovered a large tank or metal-lined chamber. As soon as they broke through, the basement was filled with the stench of death, driving the crew back. Noting the metal lining of the tank, they sent for a plumber and he struck a match to peer inside of it. Suddenly, the tank exploded, shaking the building and sending flames out into the basement. The men were buried in piles of debris but no one was seriously injured. The tank was lined with wood and metal and was 14 feet long, although thanks to the explosion, no one will ever know that it was used for. The only clue in the room was a small box that was found in its center. When it was opened by Fire Marshal James Kenyon, an "evil smelling" vapor rushed out. The gathered men ran, except for Kenyon, who was overpowered by the stench. According to the New York World, "he was dragged out and carried upstairs, and for two hours acted like one demented."

Following the excavation, and the discovery and cataloging of Holmes’ potential victims, the "Murder Castle" (as it came to be called) sat empty for several months. Not surprisingly, it drew onlookers and curiosity-seekers from all over the city. The newspapers were not yet filled with stories and illustrations about Holmes’ devious crimes but rumors had quickly spread about what had been discovered there. The people of Chicago were stunned that such things could take place -- and in their glorious city! The people of the Englewood neighborhood watched the sightseers with a combination of fear and loathing, sickened over the terrible things that brought the crowds to their streets.

Then, on August 19, the Castle burned to the ground. Three explosions thundered through the neighborhood just after midnight and minutes later, a blaze erupted from the abandoned structure. In less than an hour, the roof had caved in and the walls began to collapse in onto themselves. A gas can was discovered among the smoldering ruins and rumors argued back and forth between an accomplice of Holmes’ burning down the house to hide his role in the horror and the arson being committed by an outraged neighbor. The mystery was never solved, but regardless, the Castle was gone for good.

As time passed though, many would claim that the horrific memories here would linger.

The lot where the Castle was located remained empty for many years until finally, a U.S. Post Office was built on the site in 1938. There would be many in the area who had not forgotten the stories of Holmes’ castle -- or the tales from people who claimed to hear moaning and crying sounds coming from the grounds. This had been a common tale in the community for years and there were those who stated that the ghosts of Holmes’ victims did not rest in peace. The ground here was believed to be tainted by the death and bloodshed that had occurred on the spot and the overgrown lot was largely shunned and avoided. Most longtime residents would go out of their way to walk on the other side of the street from the area.

Even after the post office was constructed on the site where so much torture and murder took place, strange things were still reported. Passersby who walked their dogs past the new building claimed the animals would often pull away from it, barking and whining at something they could see or sense. It was something that remained invisible to their human masters, but which was terrifyingly real to the animals.

In addition, postal workers in the building had their own encounters in the place, often telling of strange sounds and feelings they could not easily explain. The location was certainly ripe for a haunting and if the stories can be believed, it was, and is, taking place!

THE CURSE OF H.H. HOLMES

The trial of Herman Mudgett, a.k.a. H.H. Holmes, began in Philadelphia just before Halloween 1895. It only lasted for six days but was one of the most sensational of the century. The newspapers reported it in a lurid and sensational manner and besides the mysteries of the Castle to report on, which were reported at length by several witnesses, Holmes created many exciting scenes in the courtroom. He broke down and wept when Georgianna took the stand as a witness for the state and eventually discharged his attorneys and attempted to conduct his own defense. It was said that Holmes’ was actually outstanding, clever and shrewd as an attorney but it was to no avail. The jury deliberated for just two and half hours before returning a guilty verdict. Afterward, they reported that they had agreed on the verdict in just one minute but had remained out longer "for the sake of appearances".

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The "accident" took place on the morning of September 4, when neighbors heard a loud explosion from the patent office. A carpenter named Eugene Smith came to the office a short time later and found the door locked and the building dark. For some reason, he became concerned and summoned a police officer to the scene. They broke open the door and found a badly burned man on the floor. The death was quickly ruled an accident and the body was taken to the morgue. After 11 days, no one showed up to claim it and so the corpse was buried in the local potter’s field. Days later, the police learned that the dead man (Pietzel) had come to Philadelphia from St. Louis and the police of that city were asked to search for relatives. Within days, attorney Jeptha Howe filed a claim with the insurance company on behalf of Carrie Pietzel and collected the money. He kept $2,500 and Holmes took the remainder. He later gave $500 to Mrs. Pietzel but then took it back, explaining that he would invest it for her.

The claim was paid without hesitation and everyone got their share of the money, except for Ben Pietzel and Marion Hedgepeth. Holmes never bothered to contact the train robber again, a slight that Hedgepeth did not appreciate.

Train Robber Marion Hedgepeth, whom Holmes made the mistake of crossing

He brooded over this awhile and then decided to turn Holmes in. He explained the scheme to a St. Louis policeman named Major Lawrence Harrigan, who in turn notified an insurance investigator, W.E. Gary. He then passed along the information to Frank P. Geyer, a Pinkerton agent, who immediately began an investigation.

Ben Pietzel never received his share of the money either, but even if he had, he would not have been able to spend it. What Holmes had not told anyone was that the body discovered in the patent office was not a cleverly disguised corpse, but Ben Pietzel himself! Rather than split the money again, Holmes had killed his accomplice then burned him so that he would be difficult to recognize. Holmes kept his part of the plan a secret as he and Georgianna were now traveling with Carrie Pietzel and her three children. She believed that her husband was hiding out in New York. The group was last seen in Cincinnati and then in Indianapolis on October 1. Carrie was then sent east and the children were left in the care of Holmes and Georgianna. Holmes made arrangements for Carrie to meet him in Detroit, where he assured her that her husband was now hiding. He arrived in Detroit several days before the appointed time and put the three children into a boarding house. Then, he went to Indiana and returned with Georgianna and installed her in a second boarding house. When Carrie arrived, she was lodged in yet another establishment. Then, he began moving about the country, apparently aware that the Pinkerton detective was on his trail. The journey lasted for almost two months but on November 17, 1894, Holmes turned up alone in Boston and was arrested and sent to Philadelphia.

As fate would have it though, he was not arrested for insurance fraud but for the horse swindle that he, Minnie and Georgianna had pulled off in Texas. He was given the choice of being returned to Texas and being hanged as a horse thief or he could confess to the insurance scheme that had led to the death of Ben Pietzel. He chose insurance fraud and was sent to Philadelphia. On the way there, Holmes offered his guard $500 if the man would allow himself to be hypnotized. Wisely, the guard refused.

The entire insurance scheme was now completely unraveling. A week later, Georgianna was located at her parent’s home in Indiana and Carrie Pietzel was found in Burlington, Vermont, where Holmes had rented a small house for her to live in while she awaited the arrival of her family. Holmes had lived at the house with her for several days but had left angry when she questioned him about a hole that he was digging in the back yard.

Veteran Pinkerton detective Frank Geyer

(Illinois State Historical Library)

The police came to believe that he was digging her grave, but for some unknown reason, he chose not to kill her. Mrs. Pietzel was arrested and was taken to Philadelphia but was soon released. No charges were ever brought against her.

Detective Geyer was slowly starting to uncover the dark secrets of Henry Howard Holmes, he realized, but even the seasoned Pinkerton man was unprepared for what lay ahead. He was beginning to sift through the many lies and identities of Holmes, hoping to find clues as to the fates of the Pietzel children. At this point, he had no idea about all of the other victims. Holmes swore that Minnie Williams had taken the children with her to London, where she planned to open a massage parlor, but Geyer was sure that he was lying. In June 1895, Holmes entered a guilty plea for a single count of insurance fraud but Geyer expanded his investigation.

Throughout his questioning, Holmes refused to reveal any other explanation for what had become of Carrie Pietzel’s three children, Howard, Nellie and Alice. Fearing the worst Detective Geyer set out to try and discover their fate -- and his fears soon came to realization. In Chicago, Geyer learned that all of Holmes’ mail had been forwarded every day to Gilmanton, New York. From Gilmanton, it had been sent to Detroit, from Detroit to Toronto, from Toronto to Cincinnati, from Cincinnati to Indianapolis and then on from there. He followed Holmes’ trail for eight months through the Midwest and Canada, stopping in each city to investigate the house that he had been renting while residing there. In Detroit, a house that Holmes had rented was still vacant and a large hole was found to have been dug in the cellar floor. Geyer was relieved to discover that it was empty.

Alice and Howard Pietzel

In Toronto, the Pinkerton searched for eight days before he found the cottage at No. 16 Vincent Street that had been rented to a man fitting Holmes’ description. The man had been traveling with two little girls. Holmes borrowed a shovel from a neighbor, which he claimed he wanted to use to dig a hole to store potatoes in. Geyer borrowed the same spade and when digging in the same location, found the bodies of Nellie and Alice Pietzel secreted several feet under the earth. In an upstairs bedroom, he found a large trunk that had a piece of rubber tubing leading into it from a gas pipe. He had told the girls that he wanted to play hide and seek with them, tricked them into climbing into the trunk and then had asphyxiated them.

This shocking discovery made Geyer work even harder to find what had become of Howard Pietzel. While questioning the neighbors, he learned that the Pietzel girls had told them that they had a brother who was living in Indianapolis. With this small clue, Geyer went to Indiana and painstakingly searched 900 houses for any clue of Holmes. Finally, in the suburb of Irvington, he found a house that Holmes had rented for a week. The place had been empty since Holmes’ occupancy and in the kitchen stove, Geyer found the charred remains of Howard.

Now the door was open for Geyer and Chicago detectives to search Holmes’ residence in the Windy City. Geyer was sure that the remaining answers that he was seeking could be found inside of the Castle. He entered the place with several police officers -- and neither Geyer nor the veteran investigators would ever forget what they found there!

THE MURDER CASTLE OF H.H. HOLMES #3

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A Newspaper illustration of Minnie Williams (Illinois State Historical Library)

In 1893, Homes met a young woman named Minnie Williams. He told her that his name was Harry Gordon and that he was a wealthy inventor. Holmes’ interest in her had been piqued when he learned that she was the heir to a Texas real estate fortune. She was in Chicago working as an instructor for a private school. It wasn’t long before she and Holmes were engaged to be married. This was a turn of events that did not make Julia Connor happy. She was still involved with Holmes and still working at the store. Not long after his engagement became official, both Julia and Pearl disappeared. When Ned Connor later inquired after them, Holmes explained that they had moved to Michigan. In his confession, he admitted that Julia had died during a bungled abortion that he had performed on her. He had poisoned Pearl. He later admitted that he murdered the woman and her child because of her jealous feelings toward Minnie Williams. "But I would have gotten rid of her anyway," he said. "I was tired of her."

Minnie Williams lived at the Castle for more than a year and knew more about Holmes’ crimes than any other person. Police investigators would state there was no way that she could not have had guilty knowledge about many of the murders. Besides being ultimately responsible for the deaths of Julia and Pearl Connor, Minnie was also believed to have instigated the murder of Emily Van Tassel, a young lady who lived on Robey Street. She was only 17 and worked at a candy store in the first floor of the castle. There is no indication of what caused her to catch the eye of Holmes but she vanished just one month after his offer of employment.

Minnie also knew about the murder of Emmeline Cigrand, a beautiful young woman who worked as a stenographer at the Keely Institute in Dwight, Illinois. Ben Pietzel went there to take a drunkenness cure and told Holmes of the girl’s beauty when he returned to Chicago. Holmes then contacted her and offered her a large salary to work for him in Chicago. She accepted the job and came to the Castle -- only to never leave it. Emmeline became homesick after a few weeks in Chicago. She had planned to marry an Indiana man named Robert E. Phelps and she was missing him and her family. Holmes later confessed that he locked the girl in one of his sound-proof rooms and raped her. He stated that he killed her because Minnie Williams objected to his lusting after the attractive young woman. Some time later, Robert Phelps made the mistake of dropping by to inquire after her at the Castle and that was the last time that he was ever reported alive. Holmes described a "stretching experiment" with which he used to kill Phelps. Always curious about the amount of punishment the human body could withstand (Holmes often used the dissecting table on live victims), he invented a "rack-like" device that would literally stretch a person to the breaking point.

In April 1893, Minnie’s property in Texas was deeded to a man named Benton T. Lyman, who was in reality, Ben Pietzel, the already mentioned accomplice of Holmes. Later that same year, Minnie’s brother was killed in a mining accident in Colorado, which is said to have been arranged by Holmes. A visit to Chicago by Minnie’s sister, Nannie, may provide more evidence of Minnie’s murderous ways and her willingness to go along with Holmes. In June 1893, Holmes seduced Nannie while she was staying at the Castle and had no trouble persuading her to sign over her share of some property in Fort Worth. She disappeared a month later, with an explanation that she had gone back to Texas, but according to Holmes, it had been Minnie who killed her. When Minnie found out that Nannie had been consorting with Holmes, the two of them got into a heated argument. Minnie hit her sister over the head with a chair and she died, then she and Holmes dropped the body into Lake Michigan.

A short time later, Holmes and Minnie traveled to Denver in the company of another young woman, Georgianna Yoke, who had come to Chicago from Indiana with a "tarnished reputation". She had applied for a job at the Castle and Holmes told her that his name was Henry Howard and that Minnie was his cousin. On January 17, 1894, Holmes and Georgianna were married at the Vendome Hotel in Denver with Minnie as their witness! After that, the wedding party (which apparently consisted of the three of them) traveled to Texas, where they claimed Minnie’s property and arranged a horse swindle. Holmes purchased several railroad cars of horses with counterfeit banknotes and signed the papers as "O.C. Pratt". The horses were then shipped to St. Louis and sold. Holmes made off with a fortune, but it would be this swindle that would later come back and destroy him.

The threesome returned to Chicago and their return marked the last time that Minnie was ever seen alive. Holmes explained that he believed Minnie had killed her sister in a fit of passion and then had fled to Europe. The police believed him, as he was known for being an upstanding citizen and it was not until much later that he confessed to killing her too. Although her body was never found, it is believed to have joined other victims in the acid vat in the basement.

THE HORROR IS REVEALED

In July 1894, Holmes was arrested for the first time. It was not for murder but for one of his schemes, the earlier horse swindle that ended in St. Louis. Georgianna promptly bailed him out, but while in jail, he struck up a conversation with a convicted train robber named Marion Hedgepeth, who was serving a 25-year sentence. Holmes had concocted a plan to bilk an insurance company out of $20,000 by taking out a policy on himself and then faking his death. Holmes promised Hedgepeth a $500 commission in exchange for the name of a lawyer who could be trusted. He was directed to Colonel Jeptha Howe, the brother of a public defender, and Howe found Holmes’ plan to be brilliant.

Holmes then took a cadaver to a seaside resort in Rhode Island and burned it, disfiguring the head and dumping it on the beach. He then shaved his beard and altered his appearance and returned to the hotel, registering under another name and inquiring about his friend, Holmes. When the body was discovered on the beach, he identified it as "H.H. Holmes" and presented an insurance policy for $20,000. The insurance company suspected fraud though and refused to pay. Holmes returned to Chicago without pressing the claim and began concocting a new version of the same scheme.

A month later, Holmes held a conference with Ben Pietzel and Jeptha Howe and his new plan was put into action. Pietzel went to Philadelphia with his wife, Carrie, and opened a shop for buying and selling patents under the name of B.F. Perry. Holmes then took out an insurance policy on his life. The plan was for Pietzel to drink a potion that would knock him unconscious. Then, Holmes would apply make-up to his face to make it look as though he had been severely burned. A witness would then summon an ambulance and while they were gone, Holmes would put a corpse in place of the "shopkeeper". The insurance company would be told that he had died. Pietzel would then receive a portion of the money in exchange for his role in the swindle but he would soon learn, as some many others already had, that Holmes could not be trusted!

THE MURDER CASTLE OF H.H. HOLMES #2

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THE MURDER CASTLE

Shortly after Holmes married Myrtle, he opened another office, this time in downtown Chicago, with the A.B.C. Copier, a machine for copying documents, which was about the only honest device that he was ever connected with. He operated from an office on South Dearborn but the copier was a failure and he again vanished, leaving his creditors with $9,000 in worthless notes.

A few months later, he began working in a drugstore in the Englewood section at the corner of 63rd and Wallace Street. The store was owned by a Mrs. Dr. Holden, an older lady, who was happy to have the young man take over most of the responsibilities of the store. Strangely, in 1887, Mrs. Holden vanished without a trace. Apparently, no one had any reason to doubt Holmes about his "purchase" of her store and she was never found when the police finally began to investigate his activities a few years later.

Holmes' accomplice in insurance fraud, Ben Pietzel.

In 1889, Holmes began a new era in his criminal life. After a short trip to Indiana, he returned to Chicago and purchased an empty lot across the street from the drugstore. He had plans to build a huge house on the property and work was started in 1890. His trip to Indiana had been profitable and he had used the journey to pull off an insurance scheme with the help of an accomplice named Benjamin Pietzel. The confederate later went to jail as a result of the swindle, but Holmes came away unscathed.

Holmes continued to operate the drug store, to which he also added a jewelry counter. In 1890, he hired Ned Connor of Davenport, Iowa as a watchmaker and jeweler. The young man arrived in the city in the company of his wife, Julia, and their daughter, Pearl. The family moved into a small apartment above the store and soon, Julia managed to capture the interest of Holmes. He soon fired his bookkeeper and hired Julia to take the man’s place.

Not long after, Connor began to suspect that Holmes was carrying on with his wife, and he was right. Luckily for him, he decided to cut his losses, abandoned his family and went to work for another shop downtown.

Now that Holmes had Julia to himself, he took out large insurance polices on the woman and her daughter, naming himself as a beneficiary. Years later, it came to be suspected that Julia became a willing participant in many of Holmes’ schemes and swindles. When he incorporated the jewelry business in August 1890, he listed Julia, along with her friend Kate Durkee, as directors.

By this time, much of Holmes’ interest was going into the construction of the building across the street. The building was an imposing structure of three stories and a basement, with false battlements and wooden bay windows that were covered with sheet iron. There were over 60 rooms in the structure and 51 doors that were cut oddly into various walls. Holmes acted as his own architect for the place and he personally supervised the numerous construction crews, all of whom were quickly hired and fired, discharging them with great fury and refusing to pay their wages. As far as the police were able to learn, he never paid a cent for any of the materials that went into the building. In addition to the eccentric general design, the house was also fitted with trap doors, hidden staircases, secret passages, rooms without windows, chutes that led into the basement and a staircase that opened out over a steep drop to the alley behind the house.

A Rare photograph of Holmes' "Murder Castle" in Englewood (Chicago Historical Society)

The first floor of the building contained stores and shops, while the upper floors could be used for spacious living quarters. Holmes also had an office on the second floor, but most of the rooms were to be used for guests -- guests that would never be seen again. Evidence would later be found to show that Holmes used some of the rooms as "asphyxiation chambers", where his victims were suffocated with gas. Other chambers were lined with iron plates and had blowtorch-like devices fitted into the walls. In the basement, Holmes installed a dissecting table and maintained his own crematory. There was also an acid vat and pits filled with quicklime, where bodies could be conveniently disposed of.

All of his "prison rooms" were fitted with alarms that buzzed in Holmes’ quarters if a victim attempted to escape. It has come to be believed that many of his victims were held captive for months before their deaths.

The castle was completed in 1892 and soon after, Holmes announced that he planned to rent out some of the rooms to tourists who would be arriving in mass for the upcoming Columbian Exposition. It is surmised that many of these tourists never returned home after the fair, but no one knows for sure. The list of the "missing" when the Fair closed was a long one and for most, foul play was suspected. How many of them fell prey to Holmes is a mystery but no fewer than 50 people who were reported to the police as missing were traced to the place. Here, their trails ended..

An advertisement for lodging during the fair was not the only method that Holmes used for procuring victims. A large number of his female victims came through false classified ads that he placed in small town newspapers, offering jobs to young ladies. When the ads were answered, he would describe several jobs in detail and explained that the woman would have her choice of positions at the time of the interview. When accepted, she would then be instructed to pack her things and withdraw all of her money from the bank because she would need funds to get started. The applicants were also instructed to keep the location and the name of his company a closely guarded secret. He told them that he had devious competitors who would use any information possible to steal his clients. When the applicant arrived, and Holmes was convinced that she had told no one of her destination, she would become his prisoner.

Holmes also placed newspaper ads for marriage as well, describing himself as a wealthy businessman who was searching for a suitable wife. Those who answered this ad would get a similar story to the job offer. He would then torture the women to learn the whereabouts of any valuables they might have. The young ladies would then remain his prisoners until he decided to dispose of them.

Amazingly, Holmes was able to keep his murder operation a secret for four years. He slaughtered an unknown number of people, mostly women, in the castle. He would later confess to 28 murders, although the actual number of victims is believed to be much higher. To examine the details of the story, the reader cannot help but be horrified by the amount of planning and devious detail that went into the murders. There is no question that Holmes was one of the most prolific and depraved killers in American history.

THE MURDER CASTLE OF H.H. HOLMES #1

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THE MURDER CASTLE OF H.H. HOLMES

In 1893, Chicago, Illinois was host to a spectacular World’s Fair -- The Columbian Exposition -- that celebrated the anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America. It was a boom time for the city and thousands of people came from all over the country to attend. Unfortunately though, the list of those “gone missing” at the end of the fair was extensive and as the police later tried to track down where these people had vanished to -- the trail turned cold on the south side of Chicago. Everything was not as shiny and beautiful as the advertising for the Exposition’s “White City” would have everyone believe, for “a devil” that became known as America’s first real serial killer was alive and well on the city’s south side, luring visitors to his "hotel", where scores of them vanished without a trace --- never to be seen again.

H.H. Holmes, regarded as America's First Real Serial Killer

THE DEVIL COMES TO CHICAGO

Today, the neighborhood of Englewood is a part of Chicago but in the late 1800’s, it was a quiet, independent community on the southern outskirts of the Windy City. It was a tranquil place and the abode of housewives and shopkeepers. Among these decent folk was a "Mrs. Dr. Holden", as the newspapers mysteriously referred to her, who ran a drugstore at 63rd and Wallace. There was almost too much trade for the woman to handle, as Englewood was rapidly growing, as so many of Chicago’s suburbs were in those days. She was delighted, therefore, to find a capable assistant who said that his name was Dr. Henry H. Holmes. He turned out to be a remarkable addition to the place.

In 1887, a druggist was a chemist and most drugstores were rather crowded places that were stocked with all manner of elixirs and potions. When Dr. Holmes compounded even the simplest prescription, he did so with a flourish, as if he were an alchemist in the midst of some arcane ritual. His long, pale fingers moved with a surgeon’s skill, his handsome face grew intense and his blue eyes grew bright. But he was no means a socially inept scientist, he was a gentleman of fashion and charming of manner. His politeness and humorous remarks brought many new customers into the drug store, especially the ladies in the neighborhood. In addition, he kept a sharp eye on the account books as well and was concerned with the profit the store was making. He was, in short, the perfect assistant to the proprietress.

It was not long before Holmes seemed to be more the manager of the store and less the prescription clerk. He began to spend more and more time working with the ledgers and chatting pleasantly with the ladies who came into the place, some of whom took a very long time to make a very small purchase. Dr. Holmes became a familiar figure as he strolled with his stick down 63rd Street, the main thoroughfare of Englewood. He appeared to be heading for a leading position in the local business community.

Trade at the drug store continued to improve, making Mrs. Dr. Holden exceedingly happy. But as for Holmes, he was still not satisfied with his lot and he had many plans and visions that drove him onward. Strangely, in 1887, Mrs. Dr. Holden vanished without a trace. A short time after, Holmes announced that he had purchased the store from the widow, just prior to her "moving out west". The unfortunate lady had (not surprisingly) left no forwarding address.

Two years later, he acquired a large lot across the street from the drug store and began construction on an enormous edifice that he planned to operate as a hotel for the upcoming Columbian Exposition in 1893. There are no records to say what Holmes decided to call this building but for generations of police officers, crime enthusiasts and unnerved residents of Englewood, it was known simply by one name -- "The Murder Castle".

Henry H. Holmes, whose real name was Herman W. Mudgett, was born in 1860 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, where his father was a wealthy and respected citizen and had been the local postmaster for nearly 25 years. Early in life, Mudgett dropped his given name and became known as H.H. Holmes, a name under which he attended medical school and began his career in crime. He was constantly in trouble as a boy and young man and in later years was remembered for his cruelty to animals and smaller children. His only redeeming trait was that he was always an excellent student and did well in school.

In 1878, Holmes married Clara Lovering, the daughter of a prosperous farmer in London, New Hampshire and that same year, began studying medicine at a small college in Burlington, Vermont. He paid his tuition with a tidy legacy that had been inherited by his wife. Even as a student though, Holmes began to dabble in debauchery. In 1879, he transferred to the medical school of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor while there, devised a method of stealing cadavers from the laboratory. He would then disfigure the corpses and plant them in places where it would look as though they had been killed in accidents. Conveniently, Holmes had already taken out insurance policies on these "family members" and he would collect on them as soon as the bodies were discovered.

A few months after he completed his most daring swindle, insuring a corpse for $12,500 and carrying out the plan with an accomplice who would later become a prominent doctor in New York, he left Ann Arbor and abandoned his wife and infant son. Clara returned to New Hampshire and never saw her husband again.

After that, Holmes dropped out of sight for six years. What became of him during most of this period is unknown and later on, even Pinkerton detectives were unable to learn much about his activities in these years, although they did come across traces of his trail in several cities and states. For a year or so, he was engaged in a legitimate business in St. Paul and so gained the respect of the community that he was appointed the receiver of a bankrupt store. He immediately stocked the place with goods, sold them at low prices and then vanished with the proceeds. From St. Paul, he went to New York and taught school for a time in Clinton County, boarding at the home of a farmer near the village of Moore’s Forks. He seduced the farmer’s wife and then disappeared one night, leaving an unpaid bill and a pregnant landlady.

In 1885, Holmes turned up in Chicago and opened an office (he was posing as an inventor) in the North Shore suburb of Wilmette. Upon his re-appearance, Holmes filed for divorce from Clara, Lovering but the proceedings were unsuccessful and the case dragged on until 1891. This did not stop him from marrying another woman however, Myrtle Z. Belknap, who father, John Belknap, was a wealthy businessman in Wilmette. Although the marriage did produce a daughter, it was nevertheless a strange one. Myrtle remained living in Wilmette while Holmes began living in Chicago. John Belknap would later discover that Holmes had tried to cheat him out of property by forging his name on deeds. He would also claim that Holmes had tried to poison him when he was confronted about the fraudulent papers. Myrtle ended the marriage in 1889.

Stories claim that the house in Wilmette where Myrtle lived is haunted today. One has to wonder if the spirit who walks here is that of John Belknap or Myrtle herself. It’s possible that her unhappy marriage, and horror as the later crimes of her husband were revealed, has caused her to linger behind.