|
|
Serial Killers 1
Wolfgang Abel & Mario Furlan
Wolfgang Abel and Mario Furlan had been best of friends in school. They went to the same university and were credited as being highly intelligent. Wolfgang's family was from the Verona suburbs of Monte Ricco. His father was a former director of a West German insurance company. Mario's family lived in a new suburban development where his father was a plastic surgeon at Verona's main hospital. Abel and Furlan started there part time murder career in August 1977. There first victim was a Gypsy drug addict, they burned him alive in his car. The victim survived long enough to say that a third person was involved.The second killing took place in Padua, wher they stabbed a casino employee to death and then beat and hacked up a homosexual waiter. The following murders was a prostitute that thay axed to death. In Vicenza Abel and Furlan crushed 2 priests skulls with a hammer, and then back in Verona they burned a sleeping hitch hiker alive. There almost ritual murders was beginning to escalate. The next victim was a homosexual priest from Trento who was executed by having a nail hammered into his forhead followed by a chisel with a wooden cross atached to it. In Milan Abel and Furlan burned 5 people in a movie theater that was showing pornos. In Munich they burnned down a discotheque where 40 people were injured and 1 women died. On March 3 1984 Abel and Furlan dressed up in Pierrot costumes and were caught dousing the floors of a discotheque in Mantua. Wolfgang Abel and Mario Furlan left leaflets at each murder scene, all were writen in Italian and explained why they were killing these people.There slogens were "We are the last of the Nazis" and "Death comes to those who betray thhe true god". Wolfgang Abel and Mario Furlan were found guilty on ten out of twenty seven murder charges during there trial in December and January of 1986.In Febuary 1987 they were sentenced to thirty years because they were partially insane.
|
Amy Archer
The Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm opened at Windsor, Connecticut, in 1907 Amy Archer was its proprietress and her husband put up the funds, after which he passed away unexpectedly in 1910. In 1913 the widow Archer became Mrs Archer-Gilligan, and after Michael Gilligan's sudden and untimely death twelve months later, the widow Archer-Gilligan. Not that husbands proved themselves more vulnerable than anybody elses for it did not go entirely unnoticed in the small local community that the residents of the Archer Home were dropping like flies - in fact, spouses excepted, there had been forty-eight deaths in the space of five years, an alarming statistic even given the customary high rate of mortality among the 'elderly and infirm' The latest victim had been Franklin R. Andrews, who had enjoyed apparently sturdy health until 30 May 1914, when he quite suddenly expired during the night.
Local residents were beginning to talk, and that kind of talk inevitably attracts the attention of the press who began a discreet investigation into Amy Archer-Gilligan's affairs. This provoked the police into their own inquiry, and between them the representatives of the pen and the 'sword' amassed sufficient incriminating evidence to secure exhumation orders on a selection of the victims of the Archer Home. Post-mortem examinations established that very little of the prodigious quantity of arsenic shown to have been purchased by Mrs Archer-Gilligan to rid the home of rats was ever put to that use - unlesss that is, one of those 'rats' was named Michael W Gilligan and another Franklin Andrews. Charles Smith had been similarly poisoned on 9 April 1914> Alice Gowdy in the early December, Maude Lynch on 2 February 1916s and so on.
During the months of June and July 1917, Amy Archer-Gilligan stood her trial at Hartford court-house> Connecticut, initially on a multiple indictment containing five charges of murder. Objections by the attorney representingher successfully reduced the counts to one - the killing of Franklin R Andrews. Amy denied the charge of course, claiming that her dedication, in equal proportion, to the welfare of her residents and to following the teaching of the Christian Church automatically precluded such activities as murder. Clearly it was not a view shared by the judge and jury, the latter convicting Mrs Archer-Gilligan of murder and the former passing sentence of death upon her. But in the end Amy did not hang; following an appeal a new trial was ordered at which she pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She was later certified insane and spent the rest of her days in an asylum, dying in 1928 at the age of fifty-nine.
|
|
Beverley Allitt
Nurse Beverley Allitt, a sufferer from a rare psychological illness, was convicted at Nottingham Crown Court in 1993 on thirteen charges of murder and causing griev ous bodily harm. It was difficult to tell during the lengthy legal process who appeared the more sympathetic and tragic figures, Allitt herself, emotionally and physically unable to cope, or the grief-stricken relatives of her victims. One thing was absolutely certain - that a National Health Service savagely and cynically deprived of human and financial resources by the government could be held directly responsible for the series of blunders, oversights, wrong diagnoses and mislaid and misinterpreted information which resulted in the tragedy at the Grantham and Kesteven Hospital. On Ward Four, the children's ward where Bev Allitt worked, the budget had first been cut and then frozen. By 1991 there were only two trained nurses on the dayshift and one on nights.
It was during fifty-eight days in the spring of that year that a series of mysterious deaths, illnesses and injuries struck Ward Four The first incident, on 21 February, resulted in the death of eight-week-old Liam Taylor. the last was on 22 April when staff lost their battle to save fifteen-month-old Claire Peck. Between these dates there were twenty-six inexplicable failures of medical treatment - four children died and nine were injured. Although staff and supervisors expressed concern, there were few enough resources to carry out day-to-day hospital work, let alone launch investigations. By the second week in April a pattern was becoming plain - but still nobody dared admit the obvious; that there was a murderer loose on the children's ward.
The impasse was broken when Dr Nelson Porter, a hospital consultant, heard a lecture on the subject of Munchausen Syn drome by Proxy. This is a personality disorder which manifests itself in the uncontrollable urge to draw attention to the sufferer, often by causing injury either to themselves or to those in their care. It is most often noted in the cases of mothers with small children; and in hospitals. Dr Porter, to his credit, now demanded instant action. The hospital authorities were less enthusiastic - after all it was Friday evening, best wait till Monday. Which was the day Claire Peck died. Dr Porter spent the weekend tirelessly investigating the catalogue of suspicious cases and sent everything - blood, samples from the drip, samples of anything that had been in contact with Claire Peck - for immediate analysis. The result came through that evening; each oF four tests gave the reading for potassium going off the top of the scale. Now the police were called in.
It was Detective Superintendent Stuart Clifton whose task it was to sift through the complex evidence detailing overdoses of insulin, reports, staff rotas. That was the key to the mystery - one name turned up every time there had been an incident; the name of Beverley Allitt, On 26 July 1991 the police case was felt to be sufficiently strong to charge Allitt with murder. In November 1991 she was formally charged,
The trial opened atNottingham Crown Court on 15 February 1993. Bev Allitt had lost five stone in weight as the result of a form of anorexia, She had been held in Rampton Psychiatric Hospital where she returned to a childhood habit of hurting herself by scalding herself with water and eating broken glass. After a trial lasting almost two months, during much of which time Bev Allitt had been too ill to attend court, the jury returned their verdicts on 11 May 1993. On 25 May Mr Justice Latham sentenced Allitt to thirteen life sentences, four on charges of murder and nine for grievous bodily harm,
It was quite clear that the case of serial killer Beverley Allitt would not be out of the news for long, Over the months following the trial Bev Allitt's physical condition improved, though her mental health remained fragile. At the end of August 1993, there were reports that she had been rushed to Bassetlaw Hospital in Worksop, where she was treated for self-inflicted wounds caused by opening out steel paper-clips and forcing them into her body,
October brought another development when Beverley Allitt confessed that she had committed three of the murders and six other attacks. She is currently detained in Rampton
|
|
Ramiro Artiedo
It was no coincidence that all seven of Ramiro Artieda's victims were eighteen-year-old girls, or that each bore a striking resemblance to the others - as well as to Ramiro's former girlfriend.
But it had not started like that at all; these revenge killings were really a postscript. The first murder to be laid to Artieda's account was motivated by the considerably less picturesque motive of sheer greed, made that much worse because the victim was Ramiro's own brother, Luis, from whom he sought to inherit the family estate. Although Ramiro was the chief suspect right from the start, lack of any conclusive evidence precluded his arrest. However, he did not go entirely unchastised, for the girl who had promised to marry Ramiro as soon as he had the money felt disinclined to enter into matrimony with a man suspected of fratricide. In short, she jilted him.
After this setback in his plans for the future, Artieda dropped out of sight for some years, though we do blow that he left his native Bolivia and spent a very instructive period in the United States working as an actor. Whether he added to that country's file of unsolved homicides we shall never blow; however, when Ramiro returned homes a series of mysterious stranglings began with the death of Margarita Rios in a deserted building in the city of Cochabamba. 'The killer then struck down Luisita Toranza in Oruro, Rosalino Villavencio was lured to an apartment in the Bolivian capital of La Paz, which had been rented by a man claiming to be a film-company executive; it proved to be one of the many character parts acted out by Ramiro Artieda. Villa Montes on the Pilcamayo river was the scene of Teresa Ardiales' deaths and Maria Perez fell victim to a self-styled visiting professor who 'visited' her college at Cucre, and strangled Senorita Perez in one of the classrooms in November 1937. Mariana Aramayo no doubt thought nothing could be safer than walking into the church at Potosi in the company of a 'monk' Her strangled body was later found hidden behind the altar; 'Father' Ramiro had claimed another victim. Finally it was a 'travelling salesman' who prematurely ended the life of Julia Caceres, throttled in a deserted house in La Paz on 8 December 1938.
Following understandable public concern, the police were obliged to reassess all the unsolved strangling cases that had taken place in Bolivia in the previous decade. In this way the still open file on the murder of Luis Artieda reminded the authorities of his elusive brother Ramiro, and a nationwide search was launched. While all this was going on, the strangler attempted to murder another young woman on 9 May 1939s but this time she had outsmarted and outrun him and lived to tell the tale; the frightened young woman identified Ramiro Artieda as her attacker, and the man now living in Cochabamba under the assumed name of Alberto Gonzalez was taken into custody. Under interrogation, Artieda admitted all the murders, including that of his brother.
Ramiro added that it had been his intention to kill as many girls of the same age and appearance as his faithless girlfriend as possible, though it proved too fanciful a motive for the police, who preferred to believe that Artieda was motivated by the desire for power, and that having escaped justice when he murdered Luis, assumed that it would always be as easy. Whatever the true reason, Ramiro Artieda was executed according to Bolivian practice by a firing squad in the courtyard of Cochabamba prison on 3 July 1939.
Add your link here
Axeman of New Orleans
On the night of May 23, 1918, a New Orleans couple named Maggio was butchered in bed by an intruder who smashed their skulls with an axeblade, then slit their throats with a razor, nearly severing the woman's head. Thus began the reign of terror of the so-called "Axeman of New Orleans," a real-life boogeyman who haunted the city for two and a half years. His MO was always the same: Prowling through the darkness, he would target a house, chisel out a back-door panel, slip inside, and find his way to the bedroom. There, he would creep toward his slumbering victims, raise his weapon, and attack with demoniacal fury. Altogether, he murdered seven people and savagely wounded another eight. Though the killer was never identified, some people believe that he was an ex-con named Joseph Mumfre, who was shot down by a woman named Pepitone, the widow of the Axeman's last victim. Mrs. Pepitone claimed that she had seen Mumfre flee the murder scene. Whether Mumfre was really the Axeman remains a matter of dispute, but one fact is certain: the killing stopped with his death.
Add your link here
|
Elizabeth Bathory
1560: Elizabeth Bathory is born into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Transylvania. Her family had many powerful relatives -- a cardinal, princes, and a cousin who was prime minister of Hungary are among these relatives. The most famous relative was Istvan (ISHT-vahn) Bathory (1533-86). Istvan was prince of Transylvania and king of poland from 1575-86. It has been said that At around the age of 4 or 5, Elizabeth had violent seizures. These may have been caused by epilepsy or another neurological disorder and may have something to do with her "psychotic" behavior later in life.
1575: Age 15, Elizabeth married Count Ferenc (pronounced FAIR-entz) Nadasdy (NAW-dawzhd with silent y). The Count was 26 years of age. The count took Elizabeth's surname so that she could keep her name. They lived together in Castle Cséjthe (which in hungarian is pronounced CHAY-tuh). In Slovak this Castle is named Cachtice (pronounced CHAKH-teet-suh). [To this day there is rivalry between the Hungarians and the Slovak's and you will get a blank expression if you refer to the "wrong" name.] The count spent a great deal of time away from home fighting in wars and for this he was nicknamed "The Black Hero of Hungary". While her husband was away Elizabeth's manservant Thorko introduced her to the occult. For a brief time Elizabeth eloped with a "dark stranger". Upon her return to Castle Cachtice the count did forgive her for her leaving. Back at the castle, Elizabeth couldn't tolerate her domineering mother-in-law. With the help of her old nurse Ilona Joo, she began to torture the servant girls. Her other accomplices included the major-domo János Ujvary (pronounced YAH-nosh OOEE-vahr-yuh), Thorko, a forest witch named Darvula and a witch Dorottya Szentes. The first ten years of their marriage, Elizabeth bore no children because she and Ferenc shared so little time together as he pursued his "career." Then around 1585, Elizabeth bore a girl whom she named Anna, and over the following nine years gave birth to two more girls, Ursula and Katherina, and in 1598 bore her first and only son, Paul. Judging from letters she wrote to relatives, she was a good wife and protective mother, which was not surprising since nobles usually treated immediate family very differently from the lower servants and peasant classes.
1600: At age 51, Count Ferenc died in battle and thus began Elizabeth's period of atrocities. First, she sent her hated mother-in-law away from the Castle. By this time it is thought that she had dabbled into some forms of sorcery, attending rituals that included the sacrificing of horses and other animals. Elizabeth, now 40 years old, grew increasingly vain and she feared the thought of aging as she may lose her beauty. One day a servant girl accidentially pulled her hair while combing it. Elizabeth slapped the girl's hand so hard she drew blood. The girls blood fell into ELizabeth's hand and she immediately thought that her skin took on the freshness of her young maid. She believed that she had found the secret of eternal youth. Elizabeth had her major-domo and Thorko strip the maid and then cut her and drain her blood into a huge vat. Elizabeth bathed in it to beautify her entire body.
1600 - 1610: Elizabeth's henchmen continued to provided Elizabeth with new girls for the blood-draining ritual and her blood baths. Elizabeth went out of her way to see to it that the dead girls were given proper Christian burials by the local Protestant pastor, at least initially. As the body count rose, the pastor refused to perform his duties in this respect, because there were too many girls coming to him from Elizabeth who had died of "unknown and mysterious causes." She then threatened him in order to keep him from spreading the news of her "hobby" and continued to have the bodies buried secretly. Near the end, many bodies were disposed of in haphazard and dangerously conspicuous locations (like nearby fields, wheat silos, the stream running behind the castle, the kitchen vegetable garden, etc.). But one of her intended victims escaped and told the authorities about what was happening at Castle Cachtice. King Mátyás (MAHT-yash) of Hungary ordered Elizabeth's own cousin, Count György (pronounced DYERD-yuh) Thurzo, governor of the province to raid the castle. On December 30, 1610 they raided the castle and they were horrified by the terrible sights. One dead girl in the main room, drained of blood and another alive whose body had been pierced with holes. In the dungeon they discoverd several living girls, some of whose bodies had been pierced several times. Below the castle, they exhumed the bodies of some 50 girls.
1611: A trial was held at Bitcse. Elizabeth, who refused to plead either guilty or innocent, and never appeared in the trial.. At this trial Johannes Ujvary, major-domo, testified that about 37 unmarried girls has been killed, six of whom he had personally recruited to work at the castle. The trial revealed that most of the girls were tortured for weeks or even months. They were cut with scissors, pricked with pins, even prodded with burning irons onto short spikes in a cage hung from the ceiling to provide Bathory with a "blood shower". Sometimes the two witches tortured these girls, or the Countess did it herself. Elizabeth's old nurse testified that about 40 girls had been tortured and killed. In fact, Elizabeth killed 612 women -- and in her diary, she documented their deaths. A complete transcript of the trial was made at the time and it survices today in Hungary. Of the people involved in these killings, all but Countess Bathory and the two witches were beheaded and cremated. Due to her nobility, Elizabeth was not allowed by law to be executed. The tow accomplices had their fingers torn out and were burned alive. The court never convicted Countess Elizabeth of any crime, however she was put under house arrest. She was sentenced to life imprisonment in her torture chamber and stonemasons were brought to wall up the windows and doors of the with the Countess inside. They left a small hole through which food could be passed. King Mátyás II demanded the death penalty for Elizabeth but because of her cousin, the prime minister, he agreed to an indefinitely delayed sentence, which really meant solitary confinement for life.
1614: On July 31 Elizabeth (age 54) dictated her last will and testament to two cathedral priests from the Esztergom bishopric. She wished that what remained of her family holdings be divided up equally among her children, her son Paul and his descendants were the basic inheritors though. Late in August of the year 1614 one of the countess's jailers wanted to get a good look at her, since she was still reputedly one of the most beautiful women in Hungary. Peeking through the small aperture in her walled-up cell, he saw her lying face down on the floor. Countess Elizabeth Bathory was dead. Her body was intended to be buried in the church in the town of Cachtice, but the grumbling of local inhabitants found abhorrent the idea of having the "infamous Lady" placed in their town, on hallowed ground no less! Considering this, and the fact that she was "one of the last of the descendants of the Ecsed line of the Bathory family", her body was placed to the northeastern Hungarian town of Ecsed, the original Bathory family seat.
More Information:
All records of Elizabeth were sealed for more than a century, and her name was forbidden to be spoken in Hungarian society.
Unlike most females of the time, Elizabeth was well educated and her intelligence surpassed even some of the men of her time. Elizabeth was exceptional, becoming "fluent in Hungarian, Latin, and German... when most Hungarian nobles could not even spell or write...Even the ruling prince of Transylvania at the time was barely literate"(20). Some modern scholars and contemporaries of hers postulated that she may have been insane, thus accounting for her seemingly inconceivable atrocities, but even a brief glance into her past reveals a person fully in control of her faculties.
Dracula, created by the Irish author Bram Stoker, was based, albeit loosely, on the Romanian Prince, Vlad Dracula, the Impaler. Raymond T. McNally, who has written four books on the figure of Dracula in history, literature, and vampirism, in his fifth book, "Dracula was a Woman," presents insights into the fact that Stoker's Count Dracula was also strongly influenced by the legends of Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary. Why, for example, make a Romanian Prince into a Hungarian Count? Why, if there are no accounts of Vlad Dracula drinking human blood, does blood drinking consume the Dracula of Stoker's novel, who, contrary to established vampire myth, seems to appear younger after doing so? The answers, of course, lie in examining the story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
It was largely Slovak servants whom Erzsebet killed, so the name "Csejthe" is only spoken in derision, and she is still called "The Hungarian Whore" in the area.
|
Joe Ball
To the early American settlers, the alllgator was a symbol of manliness signifying battles to the death between the fearsome reptile and the pioneering boatmen of the Mississippi. Later slang degraded the term 'alligator' to 'a promiscuous male'. It is the latter definition that best described Joe Ball ex-bootlegger and, in the late l930s, rumbustious landlord of The Sociable Inn.
This prosperous Texan roadhouse boasted not only the prettiest waitresses in the state, but a pool of five live alligators out at the back into which Joe would occasionally toss lumps of meat and now and again even live cats and dogs for his customers' entertainment.
At the age of forty, big muscular Joe still cut a fine figure and was still very definitely a ladies' man. He was also the envy of the local red-blooded Elmendorf males as a succession of dishy waitresses came and left The Sociable Inn - all of them clearly sociably inclined towards their lusty employer.
When the third Mrs Ball left the scene without, it seems, any word of warning, Joe was already heavily involved with twenty two year old Hazel Brown, the latest in a succession of goodtime girls gladdening the eye of The Sociable's clientele.
Then something odd happened. Hazel disappeared too. Elmendorf might not have noticed had it not been for Texas Ranger Lee Miller. Miller wondered why no one had seen Hazel leave town, and why, if she planned to leave, her account with the local bank, so recently and optimistically opened, showed no withdrawals.
A neighbour added to the gathering unease by reporting some foul smell coming from a rain barrel in The Sociable's yard. Joe laughed it all off the disappearances, these dumb broads! Who blows why they do anything; the rain barrel, just butchers meat for the 'gators. But behind the bluff exterior was a very worried Joe Ball.
During the night of 24 September 1938, a police contingent arrived at The Sociable Inn to ask Joe a few pressing questions. In reply mine host reached behind the till and. When the smoke had cleared Joe Ball lay dead on the floor, the bullet fired by his own hand lodged firmly in his skull.
Now gradually the truth of 'Alligator Joe's' fatal affairs was pieced together. The third Mrs Ball had been located, alive but terrified, in San Diego. From her the police learned that Ball had confessed to her the killing off of the waitresses and threatened her with the same if she dared speak a word about it. Not wanting to take the chance of becoming the alligators' next feed, she had fled. Mrs Ball also pointed the investigators in the direction of Clifford Wheeler, The Sociable Inn's handyman and, she alleged, Joe Ball's accomplice. Wheeler was hauled in by the Rangers and finally admitted that Joe had killed Hazel Brown and had forced the handyman to dismember the body and store it in the rain barrel prior to burial. He also confirmed the earlier murder of pregnant twenty-year-old Minnie Gotthardt, taking police to where her remains lay in a shallow grave. Searching the roadhouse, detectives uncovered a pack of incriminating letters written to Joe from several former waitresses at the Inn: many had also been pregnant; neither they, nor any trace of them were ever found again.
It was some months after the suicide that an ex-rancher neighbour of Joe Ball's contacted Ranger Lee Miller with a horrifying postscript to the police case. The man's voice quavered as he told how one night in 1936 - a night he had spent the intervening years trying to wipe from his memory - he had come across Joe Ball in the grisly act of dismembering a woman's body and throwing the pieces to the alligators. Ball had terrified the man into silence with threats against his family and the rancher wisely removed himself and his nearest and dearest to California. .
The police estimated that at least five murders had been committed at The Sociable Inn, though the true number will never be known. As for the alligators, the creatures were removed to the San Diego Zoo where they were star attractions for many years.
|
|
