Copyright

 

 

© Copyright 2022 Jon Adamson

All Rights Reserved

 

 

Contents

 

Author's Note 

 

A Ripping Yarn

Tale from the Crypt

The She-wolf of Krasnoufimsk

Death Train

Dark Water

Bizarre World War 2 Tales

Weird Hollywood

The Brooklyn Bridge Alien Abduction

The Smiley Face Murder Theory

The Bag Murders

Unexplained Mysteries and Hoaxes

The Phantom Canal Pusher

The B1 Butcher

Cabin of Horror

Bushranger from Hell

Terror in the Twilight Zone

The Stone Killer

Autoerotic Asphyxia or Murder?

The Brazilian Dexter

Black Magic and Witchcraft

Manhattan

Hinterkaifeck

Firestarter

Serial Killers and Dead Bodies

The Dragon

Family Matters

Blood Sacrifice

Sofia Zhukova

The Witch of Vladimirovac

The Deptford Poisoning

Wolf

Deadly Soup

Serial Killers Who Appeared on Television (Before They Were Caught)

Charlie Chop-off

The Beast of Florence

Rat Boy

The Town That Dreaded Sundown

Female Serial Killers

The Human Crocodile

References

 

 

Author's Note

 

This book tackles some very sad and distressing cases but in a way that I hope is sensitive and tactful. I hope there will be some information in this book that the reader may not have been aware of before. This book has made extensive use of newspapers in terms of research and is factual rather than speculative. A full list of sources can be found at the conclusion of the book.

 

 

A RIPPING YARN

 

The Cumminsville murders are five unsolved serial murders which occurred in the Cincinnati neighborhood of South Cumminsville, between 1904 and 1910. The killer acquired various nicknames as a result of his bloody exploits. These included Cincinnati's Jack the Ripper, The Man Gorilla, The Tooth Collector, and The Cumminsville Ripper. The first victim was thirty-two year-old Mary McDonald in April 1904. Mary was found badly injured at the Big Four Railroad railways. Though she was taken to hospital she died of her injuries soon after her arrival. She had received a heavy blow to the head and one of her legs was severed.

 

The police didn't really know what to make of this death. One theory was that Mary had stumbled onto the lines and been hit by a train. There was another theory that she had been thrown from a tram. However, when the police checked local public transport employees none of them recalled having an encounter with a woman matching Mary's description that day. The conductors said they would definitely have remembered if their vehicle had struck a woman or someone had been pushed from a moving tram. The death was therefore classified as unsolved.

 

Although murder obviously couldn't be ruled out no one was jumping to that conclusion just yet. Several months later a woman named Louise Mueller became the second victim when her body was found in a quiet lane. Her skull had been fractured and she had bad facial wounds. It was a most horrific attack. Because of the lack of suspects in this murder (the police failed to find anyone who might have a motive to murder Louise Mueller) it even speculated that Louise might have been hit by a train due to the proximity between the reed festooned lane she was found in to the railway line.

 

About a month later eighteen year-old Alma Steinigewig became the third victim. She was found dead in a vacant lot next to Spring Grove Cemetery in South Cumminsville. Alma was last seen boarding a street car with a man. She was apparently tired after going to a dance and was heading home when she was attacked. Alma had been struck a heavy blow by something strong because her head was smashed in and she had teeth missing. The police found a tram ticket clutched in her hand. This obviously led them to suspect that Alma had been attacked while she was waiting for a tram. A trail of blood indicated that Alma had been dragged to a nearby field after the initial blows.

 

After the death of Alma Steinigewig there were no more murders for six years - although it apparently wasn't through lack of trying. There is ample evidence that the killer continued to attack women but simply didn't manage to kill any of them. A young woman named Miss Clausing was hit with a hatchet near railway tracks but somehow survived. A woman named Josephine Hewitt allegedly had an encounter with the killer when he came out of nowhere and grabbed her by the throat. Josephine Hewitt had a revolver though and managed to scare the attacker off with her firearm. There were a dozen or so incidents like this of women having close encounters with the killer. A young woman named Dorothy Hannaford, for example, was waiting for a tram when a man grabbed her and tried to drag her away. She was saved when a trolley car approached the scene and the man fled.

 

It seems pretty certain that all of these frightening incidents were attempted murders that (happily) didn't go to plan. It wasn't until 1910 that the murders began again. Thirty-six year-old Anna Lloyd was found dead on New Year's Day. She had last been seen the previous evening waiting for a tram. Anna had had her throat cut by what the police believed was a meat cleaver. She was found gagged and dead near some railways tracks. The police believed that the victim was killed shortly after she left work the previous evening and that she had been dragged to a nearby field. There was evidence of a great struggle between the victim and killer - which suggested Anna had not gone down without a fight.

 

The fifth victim was twenty-six year-old Mary Hackney in October 1910. Mary, a married woman who had moved to South Cumminsville with her husband, was found dead in her lodging house. Her injuries were horrendous and harrowing. Her skull had been crushed and her throat had been cut 'from ear to ear'. There were also gruesome face wounds. The police found a bloodied axe near the victim. It has been alleged that the killer had a grisly habit of removing the front teeth of his victims to keep as a memento. The police found a thumb print at the crime scene but they were still no closer to finding the killer.

 

The survivors of the killer all said the suspect was short and wore a slouch hat. This was a decent start for the police in that it gave them something to go on. However, a problem arose because some survivors said their attacker was black and some said he was white. This meant the police had no idea if the killer was a black man or a white man. A prime suspect in the murders was a thirty-four year-old butcher named Henry Cook. This was because an eyewitness claimed to have seen Cook near the scene of one of the murders. Cook was arrested by the police but the evidence against him must have been weak because he was never charged with anything.

 

Charles Eckert, a young man who boarded in the same house as the last victim Mary Hackney, was someone the police investigated thoroughly. However, there was again no evidence and Eckert was not charged with anything. Mary Hackney's husband Harley was also suspected of her murder at first. Harley had discovered the body with Charles Eckert. Harley Hackney was ordered to give evidence at the inquest into his wife's death but this was as far as it went. There was no evidence that he had killed his wife and so he was never charged with anything.

 

At least three black men were arrested in relation to the murder but none of them were charged. Despite questioning numerous suspects the police drew a complete blank. There was even a theory that the killer might be another notorious fiend of that era - The Dayton Strangler. The true identity of The Cumminsville Ripper remains a mystery to this day. Perhaps the most feasible theory on this particular killer came from the The Burns Detective Agency in 1913. They claimed to have discovered that The Cumminsville Ripper was a former streetcar conductor who had since been sent to a lunatic asylum. While never verified as truth, this theory would at least provide sort sort of possible explanation for why the murders suffered from a hiatus and then eventually stopped.

 

 

TALE FROM THE CRYPT

 

Carl Tanzler was born in Dresden in 1877. He went by a battery of other names though and liked to pretend he was a relative of Countess von Cosel. Tanzler went to Australia as a youngish man but when the First World War broke out he was interned by the authorities there. He eventually went back to Germany where he got married married and had two daughters. Tanzler was quite an eccentric man but he seemed harmless enough. One of his great hobbies was working on inventions. He was always trying to build boats or things of that nature. In 1926, Tanzler moved to the United States. He had some relatives in Zephyrhills, Florida, so ended up here. His wife and daughters later joined him but he eventually left them and took a job as a radiology technician at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Key West.

 

The details on why Tanzler became estranged from his wife and daughters are vague but it seems safe to say that his state of mind and grasp on reality became increasingly frayed when they were no longer with him. Tanzler was plainly someone who had a difficult relationship with reality. He was plagued with visions of Countess von Cosel from a young age and these visions had shown him a glimpse of a darkly beautiful woman who he believed he was destined to meet and fall in love with. Fate was to intervene at this point and unwittingly feed the delusions of Tanzler in unfortunate fashion.

 

At the hospital where Tanzler worked, a twenty-two year woman named Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos was brought for medical tests because of ill health. Elena was darkly attractive and Tanzler was instantly smitten. In fact, he was convinced that Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos was the woman he had seen in his childhood visions. Panzler believed it was no accident that Elena had ended up in the hospital where he worked. He believed this was destiny and that Elena was supposed to be the love of his life.

 

It transpired though that Elena had tuberculosis - which was a serious and fatal condition at the time. Tanzler was devastated. He took it upon himself to try and save her life - despite the fact that he wasn't even a doctor. He concocted potions and quack remedies and even used electrodes on Elena in the faint hope that it might cure her. Tanzler showered her with gifts and seemed determined to keep her spirits up. Elena's family presumably thought it was a bit odd that this radiologic technician was taking such an interest but he was clearly persuasive and trustworthy and they were probably grateful for any medical help at all given the gravity of the situation.

 

As it turned out though, Tanzler's various attempts to cure Elena were purely speculative and had no chance of success. He was simply deluding himself and Elena's family. His amateurish and eccentric crackpot medical efforts were predictably all to no avail and she died on October 25, 1931. Tanzler offered to pay for Elena's funeral and her family (who didn't have much money) seemed happy to accept this kind and generous offer. Tanzler arranged for her body to put in a mausoleum but - unknown to Elena's family - Carl Tanzler was the only person with a key to this tomb.

 

Tanzler visited Elena's tomb each and every day. He brought flowers and even had a telephone installed in the tomb - a move which obviously suggested his mental health was not on the most firm footing. Over the years which followed there was increasing local speculation in the community about Tanzler's eccentric behaviour. It was said that he had become reclusive and was sometimes seen buying women's clothes and perfume. You can probably see where this story is heading can't you? Suffice to say, there was something of Norman Bates in Carl Tanzler.

 

In the end a rather macabre rumour began to circulate in the area. The rumour was that Tanzler was living with Elena's corpse. Elena's sister Florinda got wind of this rumour and decided there was only one thing to do. She would have to go and visit Tanzler to find out the truth for herself. When she arrived at the house she saw Tanzler dancing with Elena's corpse through the window. Florinda called the police and Tanzler's disturbing secret life was secret no more. It transpired that Tanzler had stolen Elena's body from the tomb about two years after her death. He had used a trolley to take it home (this was presumably done in the dead of night when there would be few people around). Before that Tanzler would visit the tomb each day and said that Elena's ghost would visit him to sing songs. He claimed that Elena's ghost instructed him to take the body home.

 

When he took home the corpse he kept Elena in a laboratory and when the skin decomposed he replaced it with wax and plaster of Paris. He used coat hangers and wires to maintain the posture of the body and stuffed it with rags. He also put glass eyes in the corpse. Panzler used perfumes and disinfectant to mask the smell. He would sit and have dinner with the corpse each night and talk to it as if it was a living person. He is believed to have slept next to the corpse in his bed although whether he tried to have sex with it is open to question. Some accounts say he did and some say he didn't.

 

It's probably safe to say that Tanzler was crazy. He said he had plans to build an aircraft on which he would launch Elena into the atmosphere. He believed the heat and radiation would then magically bring her back to life. Surprisingly, Tanzler was deemed fit to stand trial. The charges were obviously for destroying a grave and stealing a body. There wasn't though much anger at Tanzler for his actions. Most people seemed to feel sorry for him. Though his actions were macabre many felt he was just a lonely eccentric. The authorities dropped the charges in the end and seemed to have no appetite for punishing him.

 

Tanzler was not a murderer or an evil man. He was a deeply troubled man who taken to graverobbing because of a romantic obsession with a woman who was no longer alive. Elena was buried in an unmarked grave (lest Panzler should track down her body again) and this strange case was put in the past. Tanzler died in 1952. It is said that he built himself a life sized doll of Elena to live with and died in the doll's arms.

 

 

THE SHE-WOLF OF KRASNOUFIMSK

 

Irina Gaidamachuk was born in 1972 in the town of Nyagan, Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug, in the Soviet Union. Gaidamachuk was said to have developed an alcohol problem at an absurdly young age. She married a man named Yuri as a young woman and had two children. Irina Gaidamachuk was considered by the world at large to be a normal and decent women. She was popular in her community and used to help out at her daughter's school. However, her addiction to alcohol seemed to tilt her into a brutal rampage of murder. She would later say that her husband Yuri would never give her any money to buy vodka. Irina decided she would take matters into her own hands in the most savage fashion.

 

In the Urals region, she began posing as a social worker in order to gain access to the homes of frail and elderly victims. Once inside she would batter them to death with an axe or hammer and then steal what money they had. The money she stole from these murders was what you might describe as slim pickings. Irina Gaidamachuk murdered seventeen people but only gathered a total of about $1,000 from these victims combined. After she killed someone she would write a number on the wall to count how many she had killed. There were cases of Gaidamachuk trying to set fire to the homes of the people she had just killed but neighbours were able to put out the fires before they got out of control.

 

The police investigation into the murders was rather incompetent to say the least. The police only considered male suspects at first because they refused to believe that a woman was capable of such brutal murders. They then, ludicrously, developed a theory (upon hearing eyewitness accounts of a possible suspect) that the killer might be a man dressed as a woman! A similar thing happened with the serial killer Juana Barraza. In both cases it seemed to take the police a long time to deduce that a woman might be responsible for the murders they were investigating.

 

Gaidamachuk was what you would describe as an organised serial killer. Not only did she have an unsuspecting husband and family but she also did research on her victims. She would monitor the home of a potential victim to see how many visitors they had. If a potential victim had numerous visitors she would cross them off her list and look for a more isolated target. The police interviewed 3,000 people during their investigation. A breakthrough came in 2010 when an elderly woman managed to escape from Gaidamachuk and go to the police with a description of the attacker. At long last the police were now aware that the killer they were looking for was a woman.

 

The final victim was 81 year-old Alexandra Povaritsyna. Gaidamachuk had pretended to be a decorator to get access to Povaritsyna's home and then battered her to death. Neighbours of Povaritsyna were able to give a description of the 'decorator' though and Irina Gaidamachuk was eventually arrested. She confessed the murders to the police and said - "I did it for money. I just wanted to be a normal mum, but I had a craving for drink. My husband wouldn't give me money for vodka."

 

Irina's husband and friends were astonished by the revelation that she was a brutal serial killer. They couldn't believe it. Irina Gaidamachuk was sentenced to twenty years in prison for her crimes. It seemed to be an absurdly light sentence - not least to the relatives of her victims. This though was the maximum sentence for female criminals in Russia. Believe it or not, Irina Gaidamachuk was found to be completely sane when subjected to tests in custody. She has a veritable battery of nicknames in true crime circles. The best of these is simply Satan in a Skirt. She is also known as The She-wolf of Krasnoufimsk and The Maniac-woman from Sverdlovsk.

 

 

DEATH TRAIN

 

On the afternoon of Wednesday the 23rd of March 1988, 26 year-old Debbie Linsley boarded a fairly busy train at Petts Wood station at 2-16 in the afternoon. Debbie's destination was Victoria station in London. There were about nine stops between Petts Wood and Victoria and so Debbie had packed some sandwiches for the journey. There is nothing more hum-drum and ordinary than taking a train journey in the afternoon. You don't expect anything strange or disturbing to happen and it rarely does. This case would - tragically - turn out to be different though. Debbie Linsley was about to experience one of the most disturbing train rides in true crime history.

 

In those days the trains in Britain could still be pretty grim and dirty. The rail system in 1988 was in desperate need of investment and new rolling stock. If you hopped on a train in the 1980s you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a third world country or the Soviet Union. If we were to take a detour into politics for a moment one might argue that the Tory government deliberately underfunded the train system to make the case for privatisation. Anyone who remembers using trains in the 1980s will have memories of sitting on some dusty and dirty old seat in a clapped-out smelly train that should have been been put out to pasture years ago.

 

Believe it or not trains were so antiquated in those days that they didn't even have automatic doors. You had to open and close the door yourself - which was incredibly dangerous. Before the train left the station some poor train guard had to walk up and down the platform to make sure all the doors were properly shut. Another weird thing about trains in those days is that they had some closed carriages. That is to say that some of the carriages had no doors where you could move through the rest of the train.

 

If you sat in one of these closed carriages you were stuck in that single carriage until such time as you got out at a station. Closed carriages also meant that no member of staff could come into your carriage. That was great for fare dodgers but not so great for women travelling alone. Looking back closed carriages were obviously something with many potential dangers. What if a lone woman found herself in a closed carriage with a dangerous man? Tragically, this was the fate which befell Debbie Linsley.

 

Though she was safety conscious and apparently carried a 'rape whistle', Debbie had chosen to get on a closed carriage because she was a smoker and the closed-carriage on this train was a designated smoking carriage. Though she couldn't have known it at the time, choosing the closed carriage that afternoon would come at the cost of her life. There is a plausible theory that when Debbie got on the carriage there were some other passengers in there, including women - which made her feel safe. However, by the time of the attack people had got off at various stations leaving just Debbie and the assailant in the enclosed carriage.

 

Debbie Linsley was from Bromley in Kent but worked in Scotland's capital city in a hotel. She was back down south to complete a three day course on hotel management. Debbie's brother was due to get married in two weeks so Debbie was also looking for a bridesmaid's dress while she was home. More than anything Debbie was enjoying the fact that she could spend a few days with her family. Because she worked so far away it was rare for them all to be together like this.

 

Debbie's specific train journey that day was because she wanted look around the Sherlock Holmes Hotel in Baker Street. Debbie had been offered a job there by a man she met on her hotel management course and wanted to take a look at the place for herself before making a decision on whether to take up the position or not. Sadly though, Debbie would never make it to the Baker Street Hotel. Somewhere between Petts Wood station and Victoria something horrific and shocking had happened in that closed carriage. In the constricted and blocked space of the carriage no one had been able to help Debbie. In fact, only one person even reported hearing her scream.

 

When the train Debbie was on pulled into Victoria Station just before three in the afternoon a member of staff (who was checking the carriages for left luggage) found Debbie dead in the closed off carriage. There was a huge amount of blood and she had been stabbed over ten times. The knife slashes were to her face, neck, and abdomen and her hands had clear evidence of defensive wounds. Debbie's throat had been cut and there were multiple stab wounds to her breasts. The fatal blows struck her heart. The poor luggage porter who found Debbie's body must have been terribly shaken and upset by his discovery. In no time at all the police were on the scene and detectives were examining the carriage.

 

Some of the blood in the carriage was felt to have belonged to the attacker - which suggested that Debbie had put up a brave and almighty struggle before she died. The murder weapon (which the police calculated was probably a high quality kitchen knife) was never found. There was no sign of sexual assault - though it could be that the attacker never got a chance to do anything on this front because of the tremendous struggle which ensued. Rape might well have been the initial motivation in the attack but it was not something that transpired in the end. There was still money in Debbie's purse when she was found and none of her jewellery was taken so robbery definitely didn't appear to be the motive.

 

There were around seventy people on the train at the time of the murder but the fact that Debbie was on a closed carriage obviously meant they were in no position to help. The weird thing is that hardly anyone seemed to hear any commotion. One person who did was an eighteen year-old French woman named Helene Jousseline who was on the train. Jousseline was in England working as an au pair. The French girl said she heard two minutes of terrifying screams shortly after the train left Brixton station. She said she followed a suspicious man when the train stopped at Victoria but then lost him. This man was never identified. We have no idea if he was Debbie's killer or just some innocent passenger who Jousseline latched onto because she didn't like the look of him.

 

At the inquest into Debbie's death the French girl was criticised for not pulling the communication cord available to passengers - which was designed to stop the train for an emergency. If she had done that the train would have stopped and it would have been very difficult for the murderer to flee without being seen by witnesses. In this scenario he would surely have been picked up by the police. The killer would surely have had some blood on his clothes so it would have been difficult to hide this if he was relatively isolated. Sadly though the killer was not isolated. He was able to blend into the endless throng of commuters who passed through this old station.

 

You might think that it would be rather difficult to murder someone on a train in broad daylight and then escape from one of the busiest train stations in the country without detection but - sadly - this is exactly what happened. The person responsible for Debbie's murder was never found. The police suspected that Debbie was murdered between Brixton and Victoria because the eight minutes between these stations was one of the longest on that line without a stop. Eight minutes would have given the killer enough time to kill Debbie and then clean himself up somewhat. He must have then sat in the carriage with the dead body as he nervously waited for the train to arrive at Victoria. One would imagine that the killer would have been off that train like shot once it arrived. We don't know if the killer headed for the underground or simply left the station to escape into the busy streets. The latter probably would have had more logic if one were in that situation.

 

It could be that Debbie was murdered in a tunnel. If the French girl is correct then the struggle between Debbie and the killer lasted for about two minutes. Today it would be impossible to do something like this because trains do not have closed carriages and they also have extensive CCTV systems. If you murder someone on a train today you WILL be caught on camera and you will not get away with the crime. In 1988 though that sadly wasn't the case. One should note again that the busy nature of Victoria station probably made it easier for the killer to get away. A quarter of a million peple passed through the station each day in 1988 so it would have been relatively easy for the murderer to lose themselves in a crowd.

 

When the body of Debbie Linsey was discovered, the police temporarily ordered all trains on the Victoria line to be cancelled and stopped. They questioned thousands of commuters in a desperate attempt to extract any relevant information that might capture this brutal killer. The police established that Debbie must have been killed about thirty minutes after she first boarded the train. This fact obviously helped them to get a good idea of where the train was when the murder took place. Of the seventy people who had been on the train when Debbie was murdered, the police managed to eliminate around sixty from their enquires. The remaining passengers though remained unaccounted for. They were like missing jigsaw pieces in this case because the killer must have been among them.

 

Helene Jousseline told the police that she heard a woman scream in the next compartment as the train went past a part of the line where it was in full view of many houses. The police conducted door to door enquires on this stretch of the line in the faint hope that someone in these houses had seen anything but it came to nothing and was always a long shot. If you live in a house near a railway line you tend in the end not to pay much attention to the trains that periodically roll past and - besides - it would be very difficult to actually see what was going on inside the train anyway. It was a bright sunny day when Debbie was murdered and with the sun on the window of the darkly lit train no one could have seen much from afar.

 

As for suspects in

Imprint

Publisher: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Publication Date: 05-13-2022
ISBN: 978-3-7554-1370-7

All Rights Reserved