The newspapers never questioned Delmont’s version of events, and they kept flogging Arbuckle. His reputation was in a shambles, even after his friends Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin vouched for his character.

But Arbuckle’s lawyers introduced medical evidence showing that Rappe had had a chronic bladder condition, and her autopsy concluded that there “were no marks of violence on the body, no signs that the girl had been attacked in any way.” (The defense also had witnesses with damaging information about Rappe’s past, but Arbuckle wouldn’t let them testify, he said, out of respect for the dead.) The doctor who treated Rappe at the hotel testified that she had told him Arbuckle did not try to sexually assault her, but the prosecutor got the point dismissed as hearsay.

No matter what happened in court, Arbuckle also went through “trial by newspaper.” Find out what happened to Fatty Arbuckle, legally and professionally, at Past Imperfect. Link

Dead Bodies Under The Mattress

This one involves someone checking into a hotel room and noticing that something smells rotten. Eventually, they realize it’s coming from under the bed. So they move the mattress and discover a dead body. This story has been going around forever and has even been featured in movies like Four Rooms. It seems like this story is pretty unlikely, particularly given that you’d at least think a hotel maid would notice the smell of a rotting body before a hotel guest enters the room, but if you believe that, you’re giving hotel staff too much credit. In fact, the most disturbing thing about this story is how often it actually happens.

In 1982, a few auto thieves killed an accomplice and left him under the bed of their hotel in New Jersey. Four days later, someone discovered the corpse, but the room had been rented three different times in the meanwhile and no one noticed they were sleeping above a dead body. In 1987, a drug user overdosed and his high friend stuffed him under the bed and then ran away. Three days later, a family reported a nasty odor in their room, prompting the hotel staff to discover the body.

In New York 1988, a murderer was clever enough to actually put the body inside the box spring. Even so, the smell still gave away the body’s hiding place only a few days later. This time, at least two guests slept on top of the mattress, not knowing what was below.

There are tons more stories like this. Apparently hotel workers often shrug off these types of odors and go on with their business until a guest complains or even refuses to stay in the room thanks to the smell. If there’s anything to be learned here, it’s that you should never stay in a hotel room with a funky smell. And, if you do notice something off, check under your bed or mattress…or you might not want to, that is, if you’d rather not know what’s below.

Source: Snopes

Image Via neekatnite [Flickr]

Spooky Acts Resulting In Death

Whether it involves a trained escape artist failing in his act or a Halloween stunt that goes awry, this tale revolves around someone dying while an audience watches, often thinking it is all part of the act. Eventually, everyone is shocked when they learn the performer has really passed away.

While it’s a chilling story that has been told over and over, even used in an episode of Tales From The Crypt, it is far from fiction. In fact, it happens more often then you would think. In 1984, magician/comedian Tommy Cooper had a heart attack while performing on a variety show. Unfortunately, because one of the staples of his act was his inept magic skills that resulted in things going terribly wrong, everyone assumed it was part of the act until it was too late.

October 1990 was a particularly bad month for these kinds of stunts. It started when teen Brian Jewell died while performing a hanging stunt meant to entertain guests on a haunted hayride. Only six days later, another teen, William Anthony Odom, died while performing a gallows scene at a Halloween party and the noose tightened around his neck, choking him to death. Days later, Joseph Burrus performed an act that involved him having to break free from a plastic coffin buried underground and covered in concrete. As spectators watched the concrete being poured into the hole, everyone noticed when the wet concrete level suddenly dropped two feet down –the coffin had been crushed. By the time they got Burrus out of the coffin, he was dead.

In 2001, haunted hayride worker Caleb Rebh died when he decided to take the place of a skeleton placed in a noose on a tree. When he struggled with the rope, guests and fellow workers thought he was acting and left him alone until he suffocated.

A good take away from these stories is to make sure your kids never think to do tricks that involve nooses. Also, don’t raise your kid to be an escape artist.

Sources: Snopes #1, #2

Image Via Sospitis [Flickr]

Dead Bodies Mistaken For Spooky Decorations

On a similar note, there have been many of occasions where someone thought something was a Halloween decoration, but it was really a dead body. Heck, this one even served as the basic plot for the Vincent Price classic House of Wax.

In at least two cases, one in 2005 and one in 2009, a suicide victim has killed themselves in October and been left for hours, even days, because people mistook the real corpse for a Halloween decoration.

One of the more interesting, slightly less gruesome stories in this vein involves the corpse of Elmer McCurdy. The outlaw was killed in a 1911 shoot-out. Afterwards, his undertaker went ahead and embalmed him, dressed him up, and started to charge locals $.05 to take a look at the bandit. Eventually, two men claimed McCurdy as their brother in 1915, but the men were actually carnival promoters who wanted the corpse for themselves. The body toured with his “brothers” for a few years and after a few stops at various other side shows it ended up in a Los Angeles wax museum, where those operating the attraction believed it was just another wax creation. It wasn’t until the Six Million Dollar Man filmed at the wax museum and a worker accidentally broke off McCurdy’s arm that people realized it wasn’t just a creepy prop. Finally, in 1977, McCurdy was given a proper burial. To ensure he would stay buried, the medical examiner ordered that two yards of cement were laid over the body.

Strangely, House of Wax was based on a Charles Belden’s story The Wax Works written in 1933. Both of these were made long before any of these stories hit the news, so either earlier news stories like this are now buried or else this one was an urban legend that eventually came true rather than a true story that became an urban legend.

Sources: Snopes #1, #2

Kidney Thieves

Just about everyone has heard the story of the person waking up in a bathtub full of ice with a note telling them to go to a hospital if they want to live. While the bathtub of ice  and note parts may be fiction, this kind of this has been known to happen in India, where a 1995 law requires organ donations to come only from closely related family members, creating a thriving black market for organs.

In 1998, three surgeons and seven accomplices were arrested after being accused of tricking people into having their kidneys removed without permission. The criminals would tell the impoverished victims they could get a good job, but first they had to undergo a medical exam. The exam would then reveal the “applicant” needed a small surgery. During the procedure, the doctor would remove one of the unconscious victim’s kidneys and then the victim would hear nothing more about a job offer. In 2008, a similar racket was discovered by authorities.

Like the wax museum stories, the interesting thing about these cases is the fact that the urban legend was around long before the true stories. In this case, the legend has been spread around since at least the eighties, but the problem in India did not start until after the 1995 law was passed.

Sources: Snopes, Washington Post

Image Via The Doctr [Flickr]

Intentionally Infected With AIDS

The most common version of this story involves a young girl dancing at a club when she feels a small prick on her arm or leg. Then she hears someone whisper “welcome to the wonderful world of AIDS,” before they escape unseen. At her feet, she discovers a blood-filled needle and when she visits the hospital, they confirm that she now has HIV. Another version involves a girl going to the movies and discovering a note informing her of her new status before she leaves.

The earliest version of this story has actually been traced back to the mid-80’s, when a man sleeps with a woman he’s only just met at a bar and then wakes up seeing the words “welcome to the world of AIDS” scrawled on the mirror in lipstick.

While the story of an anonymous stranger injecting someone at a club and the “welcome to the world of AIDS” line are both urban legends, the truth is that there are many stories of people who have intentionally been given HIV. In 2006, a woman in England was arrested for intentionally having unprotected sex with men in an act of revenge after she became infected with the disease.

Some people have even been intentionally injected with the virus, but not by random strangers like the victims in the legends. AIDS activist Brryan Jackson was infected as an 11 month-old baby by his father, who did not want to have to pay child support. By the time he was five, his infection was discovered and his father was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Fortunately, the nineteen year-old activist is still doing fine despite his condition.

Another person intentionally infected was Janice Trahan, who was given the virus, along with Hepatitis C, by her ex-lover Doctor Richard J. Schmidt who collected a samples from some of his patients and gave it to Trahan by claiming it was a vitamin B injection. Dr. Schmidt was charged with attempted murder and sentenced to 50 years. It is unknown how Trahan is doing because the case was so long ago and there are no follow up new stories on her since 2000. This case was the first of its kind to hit the court system and it eventually inspired a similar Law & Order episode.

Sources: About.com, BBC, ABC News, Wikipedia

Image Via cooling [Flickr]

I know people always claim that urban legends are true and often claim that they know someone that was really involved with the story, but do any of you know any true urban legends that you can actually prove? Try to leave links to the news stories or other sources that prove your tale if you really want any of us to believe you.

It’s easy to look at this picture and wonder, “why is this umbrella so special that it is locked in a glass case?” But that’s before you learn it was a brilliant Soviet spy weapon:

So it was that one day, while Markov was walking to his car in London, he felt a sharp bite on his thigh. When he turned around he saw nothing, only a man who fumbled briefly with an umbrella before running off. The next day he became deathly ill, and died, as one is wont to do when becoming deathly ill. To this day no one has ever been tried for the murder.

A dark tale from our “Dustbin of Gruesome History” files.

THE DISCOVERY

One the night of April 28, 1908, Joe Maxson, a hired hand on a farm outside of La Porte, Indiana, awoke in his upstairs bedroom to the smell of smoke. The house was on fire. He called out to the farm’s owner, Belle Gunness, and her three children. Getting no answer, he jumped from a second-story window, narrowly escaping the flames, and ran for help. But it was too late; the house was destroyed. A search through the wreckage resulted in a grisly discovery: four dead bodies in the basement. Three were Gunness’s children, aged 5, 9, and 11. The fourth was a woman, assumed to be Gunness herself, but identification was difficult- the body’s head was missing. An investigation ensued, and Ray Lamphere, a recently fired employee, was arrested for arson and murder. Before Lamphere’s trial was over, he would be little more than a sidebar in what is still one of the most horrible crime stories in American history …and an unsolved mystery.

BACKGROUND

Belle Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storseth in Selbu, Norway in 1859. At the age of 22 she emigrated to America and moved in with her older sister in Chicago, where she changed her name to “Belle.” In 1884 the 25-year-old married another Norwegian immigrant, Mads Sorenson, and the couple opened a candy shop. A year later the store burned down, the first of what would be several suspicious fires in Belle’s life. The couple collected an insurance payout and used the money to buy a house in the Chicago suburbs. Fifteen years later, in 1898, that house burned down, and another insurance payout allowed the couple to buy another house. On July 30, 1900, yet another insurance policy was brought into play, but this time it was life insurance: Mads Sorenson had died. A doctor’s autopsy said he was murdered, probably by strychnine poisoning, so an inquest was ordered. The coroner’s investigation eventually deemed the death to be “of natural causes,” and Belle collected $8,000, becoming, for 1900, a wealthy woman. (The average yearly income in 1900 was less than $500.) She used part of the money to buy a farm in La Porte. But there was a lot more death -and insurance money- to come.

MORE SUSPICIONS

In April 1902, Belle married a local butcher named Peter Gunness and became Belle Gunness. One week later, Peter Gunness’s infant daughter died while left alone with Belle… and yet another insurance policy was collected on. Just eight months after that, Peter Gunness was dead: He was found in his shed with his skull crushed. Belle, who was 5’8″, weighed well over 200 pounds, and was known to be very strong, told police that a meat grinder had fallen from a high shelf and landed on her husband’s head. The coroner said otherwise, ruling the cause of death to be murder. On top of that, a witness claimed to have overheard Belle’s 14-year-old daughter, Jennie, saying to a classmate, “My mama killed my papa. She hit him with a meat cleaver and he died.”

Belle and Jennie were brought before a coroner’s jury and questioned. Jennie denied making the statement; Belle denied killing her husband. The jury found Belle innocent -and she collected another $3,000 in life insurance money. And she was just getting started.

NOT WELL SUITED

Not long after Peter Gunness’s death, Belle started putting ads in newspapers around the Midwest. One read:

Comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts of La Porte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided, with view of joining fortunes. No replies by letter considered unless sender is willing to follow answer with personal visit. Triflers need not apply.

The ads worked, and suitors began to show up at the farm with visions of “joining fortunes” in mind. John Moo arrived from Minnesota in late 1902 with his life savings of $1,000 in hand. He stayed at the farm for about a week …and disappeared. Over the years several more met the same fate; Henry Gurholdt from Wisconsin, who had brought $1,500; Ole B. Budsburg, also from Wisconsin, who brought the deed to his property, worth thousands, and was last seen at a La Porte bank in April 1907; and Andrew Hegelein, from South Dakota, also last seen in the bank, in January 1908.

Andrew Hegelein turned out the be the last of the disappearing suitors, because a few weeks after his disappearance, his brother, A.K. Hegelein. wrote to Gunness to inquire about him. She replied that he’d gone to Norway. Hegelein didn’t believe her -and threatened to come to La Porte to find out what happened to him.

LAMPHERE

We said at the start of the story that when the Gunness home burnt to the ground, killing the three children and, presumably, Belle Gunness, former employee Ray Lamphere was arrested. The reason: Lamphere had been hired in 1907, and by all accounts, had fallen in love with Gunness. The seemingly constant coming and going of suitors enraged him, and he and Gunness fought about it. In February 1908, around the time of Hegelein’s disappearance, Gunness fired Lamphere. Not only that -she went to the local sheriff and told him Lamphere was making threats against her. The day before the house fire, she went to a lawyer and made out a will, telling the lawyer that Lamphere had threatened to kill her and her children…and to burn her house down. Under the circumstances, the sheriff had to arrest Lamphere – but the focus of the investigation would soon turn elsewhere.

THE WOMAN IN THE BASEMENT

Lamphere denied any involvement with either the arson or the murders. Few people believed him …but there were serious questions about the body of Belle Gunness. Doctors who inspected the remains said they belonged to a woman about 5’3″ (they had to account for the missing head, of course) who weighed about 150 pounds. Gunness was much larger than that. And several neighbors who knew Gunness well viewed the remains -and said it wasn’t her. Then A.K. Hegelein showed up looking for his brother. He told the police his story and insisted that a search be made of Gunness’s property. The search began on May 3. Two days later, five bodies, carefully dismembered and wrapped in oilcloth, were discovered buried around the farm.

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

The first body was determined to be that of Gunness’s daughter Jennie, who, according to Belle, had been in school in California since 1906. The second body was Andrew Hegelein. The third was an unidentified man; the fourth and fifth were unidentified eight-year-old girls.

Neighbors told investigators that they had often seen Gunness digging in her hog pen, so they dug up that area -and found body after body after body. Included in the group: suitors John Moo, Ole Budsburg, and Henry Gurholdt. In the end the remains of 25 bodies (some reports say as many as 49) were found, many of them unidentifiable.

Belle Gunness had obviously lured the men to her farm and killed them for their money. People in La Porte began to believe that if she could do that, she could fake her own death, and that the body found after the fire was yet another of her victims. It was beginning to look a lot like A.K. Hegelein’s threat to come look for his brother made Gunness panic and come up with her bloody plan. But then a problem arose: On May 16 a part of a jawbone and a section of dentures was found in the ruins of the house. Gunness’s dentist, Ira Norton, inspected them -and said the dental work on the teeth belonged to Belle Gunness.

THE AFTERMATH

After a long investigation the body of the woman in the fire was officially declared to be that of Belle Gunness, and was buried as such. Ray Lamphere was tried for arson and murder-but because of all the lingering questions surrounding the case, he was convicted only of arson. He received a 20-year prison sentence and died less than a year later of tuberculosis. While in prison he reportedly confessed to a prison minister that he had helped Gunness bury some of her victims -and that the woman in the basement was not her. Gunness had hired a woman from Chicago as a housekeeper just days before the fire, he said, and drugged her, killed her, decapitated her, dressed her in Belle’s clothes, and put her in the basement. He helped Gunness start the fire, he said, and was then supposed to escape with her, but she double crossed him and left on her own. However, none of his story could be substantiated.

People reported seeing Belle Gunness at dozens of locations across the U.S. over the following decades. None of these sightings were ever confirmed. Then, in 1931, a woman named Esther Carlson was arrested for the poisoning murder of her husband in Los Angeles …and she reportedly looked a lot like Belle Gunness. Carlson died awaiting trial, but some La Porte residents made the trip to the Los Angeles morgue and viewed the body. They said that they believed it was Gunness.

UPDATE

In 2008 Andrea Simmons, an attorney and graduate student at the University of Indianapolis in Indiana, led a team of forensic biologists to the grave where Belle Gunness was buried. With permission from Gunness’s descendents, they dug up the grave with the intent of extracting DNA from the corpse and comparing to the DNA of living relatives. Results were hoped for by April 28, 2008, the 100th anniversary of the fire at the Gunness farm, but they were, unfortunately, inconclusive. Attempts are ongoing, and someday, possibly soon, the mystery of Belle Gunness, one of the most diabolical serial killers in history, might finally be solved.

__________

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Today, Ludwig remains famous for the castles he built and attempted to build, most notably Neuschwanstein Castle, perched high in the Alpine foothills. The king was a romantic, a friend and suporter of composer Richard Wagner, and he hired theatrical set designers rather than architects to design his castles. More absorbed in his personal world than state affairs, Ludwig spent most of his time on his own projects — emptying his personal coffers — and left his ministers frustrated by his inattention.

What is left is a mystery -and those castles! The Atlantic has a collection of 30 photographs of the king’s life and those gorgeous palaces that still grace the region. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: AP/Christof Stache)

In retrospect, it may have been a bad idea for Anthony Garcia to commemorate his first killing by having it inscribed on his chest. When a LA County homicide investigator was later looking through pictures of gang members, he noticed something important:

Each key detail was right there: the Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where 23-year-old John Juarez was gunned down, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way and the street sign — all under the chilling banner of RIVERA KILLS, a reference to the gang Rivera-13.

As if to seal the deal, below the collarbone of the gang member known by the alias “Chopper” was a miniature helicopter raining down bullets on the scene.

Lloyd’s discovery of the tattoo in 2008 launched a bizarre investigation that soon led to Anthony Garcia’s arrest for the shooting. Then sheriff’s detectives, posing as gang members, began talking to Garcia, 25, in his holding cell. They got a confession that this week led to a first-degree murder conviction in a killing investigators had once all but given up hope of solving.

Link via SayUncle | Photo: LA County Sheriffs

After almost 70 years of marriage, Mrs Tang – suffering dementia – allegedly killed Ching Yung Tang in their plush sixth-floor unit in the Connaught apartment complex overlooking Sydney’s Hyde Park on March 12, 2010.

It is said that Clara believed her husband was trying to poison her. She allegedly confessed to the murder.

Is 92 too old to stand trial for murder?  Is there a point where the cost of proceeding outweighs the need for societal justice?

Les Kennedy of the Sydney Morning Herald has more: Link

Are you good at cryptography? Then the FBI wants to hear from you – they’ve just released a code that may just solve a 12-year-old murder case:

On June 30, 1999, police in St. Louis found the body of Rick McCormick, 41, who had been murdered and dumped in a field. The only clues the FBI found about the time leading up to his death came in the form of two pieces of paper in his pants pocket: Handwritten on the scraps were 30 lines of numbers and letters grouped into several sections.

After 12 years of trying to untangle the cryptographic mess, investigators from the FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit and the American Cryptogram Association are throwing up their hands.

This is where you come in.

Link (self-starting video)

I’ve found myself watching a lot of Law & Order reruns lately, mostly because you can find it most hours of the day on various TV channels. Now we have statistics that track the outcomes of the cases in each season. Not only that, but they are compared with what was actually going on in New York City at the time -the NYC murder rate and the politics of municipal law enforcement. Some of the changes in the show over time reflect the real world, and other changes were made for the TV audience. Read the analysis at, appropriately enough, Overthinking It. Link -via Metafilter

Rubber is a French comedy/thriller that revolves around a murderous tire.

RUBBER is the story of Robert, an inanimate tire that has been abandoned in the desert, and suddenly and inexplicably comes to life. As Robert roams the bleak landscape, he discovers that he possesses terrifying telepathic powers that give him the ability to destroy anything he wishes without having to move. At first content to prey on small desert creatures and various discarded objects, his attention soon turns to humans, especially a beautiful and mysterious woman who crosses his path. Leaving a swath of destruction across the desert landscape, Robert becomes a chaotic force to be reckoned with, and truly a movie villain for the ages.

Despite an April 1 release date, this is a real feature film that made the rounds of film festivals last year. Link -via Buzzfeed

From this point on, the killer started communicating via letters and greetings cards. Each of these messages was concluded with the crossed-circle design pictured above. Later it became known as the Zodiac signature. These letters as well as some coded messages were sent by the killer to different, well-known newspapers, including the San Francisco Examiner and the Vallejo Times Herald.

Many of these notes still haven’t been decoded, and the murders have yet to be solved. See the coded messages at Environmental Graffiti. Link

Stories can change your life – some inspire you to learn and to achieve, but alas some can lead to evil. Weird Worm has a list of 4 novels that inspired real life murders. Take, for example, John Fowles’ The Collector:

The Book:
The first book in John Fowles’ distinguished career, “The Collector” (published in 1963) has been on the edge of popular culture for decades. It even inspired a highly regarded movie that almost nobody seems to remember. And maybe that’s for the best.

In the novel, Frederick Clegg is an avid butterfly collector and with what seems to be a nasty version of Aspergers syndrome. Lacking social skills, he lives emotionally apart from the rest of the world until he wins a soccer pool that allows him to finally live physically apart from people as well. However he grows lonely in his cabin in the woods and kidnaps young Miranda, whom he had been obsessing over for quite some time, and keeps her in the cellar, adding her to his collection (book titles!). Anyway, some changing narration shows Miranda and Clegg’s twisted relationship, as well as the scope of Clegg’s illness. Let’s just say, in the end, he resolves to continue to add to his collection.

The Psychotic:
Christopher Wilder, a serial killer of eight young women in the early-mid eighties, was found to have the book in his possession when he shot himself. Robert Berdella, the Kansas City Butcher, tortured and killed at least six men in the 1980’s, and claimed to be inspired by the film version of the novel.

The killers Leonard Lake and Charles Ng are the most closely tied to the book, as Lake was directly inspired by and obsessed with the novel. Lake sought his own potential Miranda’s, deemed “M-Ladies”, two of whom were abducted and ultimately killed. The pair also killed close to two dozen others. A chance arrest on a firearms charge related to shoplifting lead to their discovery, with Ng fleeing before being caught and Lake swallowing a hidden cyanide pill while in custody.

Read 3 more examples of novels that inspire (some) people to kill: Link

The “truth” eluded Canadians for nearly a century, right back to July 16, 1917, when the missing painter’s body surfaced on Algonquin Park’s most famous lake – a bruise over his left temple, one ankle wrapped round and round with fishing line.That suspicious death – accident? murder? suicide? – and the subsequent question as to whether his body remained at Canoe Lake, where his friends had buried him, or had later been exhumed at the Thomson family’s request and taken to Leith, Ont., has made Tom Thomson Canada’s greatest enduring mystery, his famous works inextricably tied to his fate.

In 1956, a body was unearthed at the Canoe Lake cemetery that some thought might have been Thomson’s, particularly because of the hole in the skull. Others said it was was a young aboriginal man who had undergone trepanation. Just this past year, modern technology was brought into the picture to determine just who the skull with the hole in it belonged to. Link -via Nag on the Lake

The New York City medical examiner, Dr Charles Norris  himself, was on call the night of the Travia arrest. He followed the policemen up the wooden stairs to Travia’s apartment, walked over to inspect the dismembered corpse.

His thick eyebrows drew together. The blood pooled around the half-body was a bright cherry-red. He bent to look closer at the woman’s face. It was flushed pink, despite the massive blood loss. As told by a crime writer, Norris walked over to the waiting detectives and announced: “Boys, you can’t hold this man for murder.”

The Brooklyn police assured him that they could – and would.
Unlike the police, Travia’s lawyer found the medical evidence compelling.

The case pitted forensic science against police procedures of the day, and science won.

In March 1927, he was acquitted of murder, convicted instead of illegally dismembering a dead body. A life-saving difference: in 1920s New York, it meant that he went to prison instead of Sing Sing  prison’s infamous electric chair. They celebrated at the city medical examiner, believing that the case had given them new credibility, that they’d also proved that forensic toxicology was a credible, believable tool.

Read the whole story at The Guardian. Link -via Boing Boing

Nestled in a chest of drawers existed a list of names of those lives that succumb to the Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory. For years, Bathory’s sadistic killing spree went unnoticed as she left a trail of blood from Cachtice Castle to her abode in Vienna.

In Bathory’s Vienna Mansion, her cellar acted as a sadistic torture chamber, fashioned with a cage of spikes. The spikes could be raised or lowered by using as a pulley. Peasant girls and seamstresses with ample bosoms were locked in the cage, while Elizabeth Bathory’s maid Dorothea Szentes prodded the girls with a red hot poker. Elizabeth Bathory would shout perverse words at the girls, forcing them to be impaled upon a spike. She would later bath in their blood, believing it would preserve her youth.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.

According to LRPD public information officer Lt. Terry Hastings, Billups and his girlfriend, 35-year-old Briticia Walters, “got into an argument and he stabbed her in the throat and killed her” in her bedroom at some time before 1 a.m. this morning at Walters’ home at 4215 West 18th St., Little Rock.

According to Hastings, Billups stuffed Walters’ 7-month-old son between the mattress and a wall and “covered him up with clothes” before driving Walters’ car to Conway to start his new job.

Link – via Unknown Highway

But apparently, there is a way around double jeopardy – here’s the story of a triple murder and triple jeopardy:

Master Sgt. Timothy Hennis was convicted once before of killing Kathryn Eastburn and her daughters, Kara, 5, and Erin, 3. He even spent several years on death row awaiting execution after his 1986 conviction, but he gained his freedom after an appeal and acquittal at a second trial in 1989.

After that, he continued his career in the Army.

Big mistake.

Years later, the move allowed prosecutors to put him on trial yet again — and a U.S. Army court martial jury today unanimously found Hennis guilty of murdering Eastburn and her daughters nearly 25 years ago.

Hennis was found guilty and has now been sentenced to death for the second time.

Link (Photo: Jim R. Bounds/AP)

Some serial killers become massively infamous and have movies made about their lives, while others for various reasons slip through the cracks of history without leaving much of an impression on our collective conciousness. This doesn’t mean there aren’t some incredibly disturbing relatively unknown killers in our history though, take Tillie Klimek for instance:

Tillie found a schtick, and stuck to it. Namely: murderous insurance fraud. She went through five husbands, three neighborhood children, and just about anyone else she could get her hands on. Not only did she grab insurance money out of the deal, she also gained a reputation as a fortune teller based on predicting the deaths of these people. At one point, she was buying a dress for her husband’s funeral, when a stranger asked when he had died. Her response? “Ten days from now.”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by redsfaithful.

“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?

Whatever the reason, many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks. And the country’s many Sinatra lovers, like Mr. Gregorio here in this city in the southernmost Philippines, are practicing self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation.

Norimitsu Onishi of The New York Times has the fascinating story: Link (Photo: Jes Aznar/NY Times)

Bob Rupp has a third view. He says he has never read In Cold Blood, nor seen the movies, and never will. But he believes that Capote was unfair to the Clutters, because he left to posterity a memory of them that is dominated by the gruesome manner of their deaths rather than the wonderful accomplishments of their lives. He still thinks about the Clutters often, hence his idea for the memorial.

Link -via Metafilter

A retired accountant whose daughter was killed 27 years ago was facing charges last night over the alleged abduction of the man he always blamed for her death. The man was left bound, gagged and injured outside a French courtroom.

André Bamberski, 72, is suspected of taking justice into his own hands over the German authorities’ failure to act against Dieter Krombach, a German cardiologist, after a French court convicted him of manslaughter in his absence.

Mr Krombach, 74, was found trussed up with head injuries in a lane near the criminal court in the eastern city of Mulhouse on Sunday after an anonymous caller with an Eastern European accent tipped off police. Mr Bamberski, who is of Polish origin and lives near Toulouse, was in Mulhouse at the weekend and is suspected of making the call, police said.

Link (Photo: Remy Gabalda/AFP/Getty Images)

Do two wrongs make a right or is Bamberski – if he did do it – justified in kidnapping the alleged (Update 10/26/09: alleged/convicted – there’s controversy about this) killer? What would YOU do if it were your child?

In 1920s, mutilated bodies of murdered children turned up in the streets of New York City. The crimes were so horrific that they were quickly attributed to a boogieman.

The truth was more mundane but much more disturbing – the murders were perpetrated by a man named Albert Fish, who aptly earned the nickname of the Vampire of Brooklyn:

At this time, Albert H. Fish was working at the nearby YMCA and the center for mentally challenged children. He was fired when “things about these children came out”. He was quoted as saying he “liked killing disabled and black boys because no one would miss them”.

February 11, 1927 Billy Gaffrey was snatched from a hallway in an apartment building. A witness said “it was the Boogieman that got him”. Albert Fish had taken the boy back to the boarding house he was staying at and got right to work. Using a saw, knife, and cleaver he dismembered and drained the blood of Billy Gaffrey. He drank the blood and saved the meat for food. He took the ears and face and made it into a stew with carrots and onions and his behind was roasted in the oven.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.

It’s no surprise the money was never claimed, however, because the so-called ‘phantom killer’ was a complete myth!

Detectives had apparently been tracking the DNA of a factory worker who packaged cotton buds used by the police to collect samples, according to ‘Stern.de’.

Link -via reddit

Here’s what happened to a man named James Brewer, who thought he was dying and confessed to a murder … only to get charged with it after he got better!

Convinced he was dying after a stroke, Mr Brewer reportedly admitted shooting dead 20-year-old neighbour Jimmy Carroll.

The 58-year-old, who had fled Tennessee after the killing, was arrested after his condition improved, reports the BBC.

"He wanted to cleanse his soul, because he thought he was going to the great beyond," said police detective Tony Grasso, who interviewed Mr Brewer in an Oklahoma hospital.

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Either somebody messed up or the news anchor just got pranked royally.

When reporting a sad news about Molly Bish, a 16-year-old girl who disappeared eight years ago, WFSB Connecticut news anchor Kara Sundlund came face to face with an unlikely suspect …

– via lemondrop

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by bckids1208.

British physician Harold Shipman may have killed as many as 400 of his patients during his medical career, which would make him the most prolific serial killer of all time. An official audit estimates the number of victims at 236 over 24 years, but the exact number will probably never be known.

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From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by mrbabyman.