“It’s like some reverse Psycho scene,” an unnamed law enforcement official told Fox News after a woman in Brooklyn was found living with her son's corpse in September, 2016. The woman, Rita Wolfensohn, a legally blind hoarder, may not even have been aware her son died in her house (really, though, she couldn't smell it?). 

The remains were discovered by Josette Buchman, Wolfensohn's sister-in-law, who found what's been described as a "completely intact" human skeleton wearing jeans, socks, and a shirt, lying on a mattress in a second floor bedroom, surrounded by clutter. The state of decay indicates the man died maybe 20 years ago.

The family has yet to comment on whether they'll keep the remains for Halloween, to make use of them as part of a porch display for trick-or-treaters. 

In May 2016, actress Amber Heard filed for a divorce and restraining order from actor Johnny Depp. Heard alleged that Depp physically and emotionally abused her throughout the entirety of their brief marriage. Heard even detailed an incident in which Depp took her cell phone and smacked her across the face with it. Heard documented her purported injuries from the incident with photos. The two have been in-and-out of divorce proceedings for several months, but have recently come to a settlement. Heard received $7 million from Depp, which she then donated the entirety of to charity.

You wouldn’t think that something as deplorable as snuff films would have such a rigid definition, but snuff aficionados hold their nightmare smut to high standards. Technically, a snuff film has to be a film that features the murder of an actual person, or people, that was made for the express purposes of financial gain. Is there really a market out there for actual snuff films? Who would spend their hard earned money on footage of someone being murdered? If the popularity of films and video games that feature plotlines based on snuff films are to be believed, people are at least willing to entertain the idea that snuff films are out there, and people are buying. If you’re ready to get dark, keep reading to discover what’s a snuff film hoax, and what films are truly for the worst people in humanity.

Are snuff films real? It’s a valid question. While there’s footage of people being murdered, or committing suicide online, that doesn’t technically make them snuff films. Although with the way online content is repackaged and uploaded on less than trustworthy sites that are covered with ads, you could argue that anything could be used for used for financial gain, even cell phone video of a brutal murder or some coked-up guy cutting up his lover while listening to New Order. Snuff films play into our fear of the unknown, and as we enter into an ever-expanding digital realm where you can know everything about any topic whenever you want, they play the part of the bogeyman lurking just a few keystrokes away. 

The warning that appears at the beginning of Cannibal Holocaust doesn't truly prepare you for the intense sexual violence and brutality that the viewer is about to experience. A woman is impaled on a spike, people are eaten alive by natives, and multiple animals are mutilated onscreen; audiences in 1980 weren't ready for a film like this.

In order to perpetuate the idea that the film was actually made up of found documentary footage, Cannibal Holocaust's director, Ruggero Deodato, had his main actors sign contracts that would keep them out of the public eye for a year and that plan backfired when he was arrested on charges of releasing footage of their deaths. After explaining how the effects were captured and that the actors were completely safe, the charges against Deodato were dropped. 

This film that allegedly shows two young boys in Tarzan costumes raping another young boy in a cage before he's murdered on camera played a large role in The Franklin Coverup, a child sex ring that was allegedly being run by Lawrence E. King, manager of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, and a vital member of the Reagan era Republican party. There's no proof that this video exists, but the many deaths of people surrounding this case lend an air of conspiratorial evidence to a story that would otherwise be deemed far-fetched. It doesn't help that the film allegedly takes place at Bohemian Grove, a private, mysterious, secluded camp for the wealthy elite.

Imagine going on the Internet one day and finding a video of some guy tying another man to a bed and stabbing him to death with an icepick before cutting him open and having sex with the dead body. All of this is set to New Order's "True Faith," by the way. This video is definitely very real, and it was just the beginning of a series nightmarish acts that Luka Magnotta would commit before being arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and being tried and convicted of first-degree murder. In a separate trial that saw the owner of a gore website go on the stand for hosting the film, Canada legally declared 1 Lunatic, 1 Icepick to be a snuff film, stating, "It has death, it has horror, it has cruelty, it has violence, it has dismemberment, and it has sex. This isn't staged. This isn't a person following a script."

On an unmarked video, a teenage girl begs for her life before she's raped and strangled with a wire, causing her to foam at the mouth and her eyes to roll back into her head. After the girl is fully dead, she's wrapped in a plastic sheet and dragged out of the room. No one knows when this series of events unfolded, but it was found on a VHS tape seized during a raid on a Latvian man’s house in Skelmersdale, Lancashire. The man who was in possession of the film, Andreas Bauminis, was sentenced to eight months in jail for possessing the film but no further investigating went into to finding out who the young woman was, or who murdered her. 

Dafu Love, if it even exists, was supposedly made by the very real Peter Scully, a man accused of running an international pedophile ring, and various reports have alleged that it features Scully and another man smashing two babies together as if they're having a pillow fight, or maybe they just torture them to death in a different awful way. While the existence of Scully's snuff film is up in the air, what is known is that Scully's sex crimes in the Philippines were so awful that the country is trying to bring back the death penalty just so they can execute him.  

In a lovely green meadow, one Eastern European man begs for his life while a teenager slowly and deliberately beats him to death with a hammer. Another boy from behind the camera says something. The two teenagers take turns posing over the older man's dead body. If you've watched 3 Guys, 1 Hammer then you know that the death of Sergei Yatzenko at the hands of Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuk is one of the most brutal slayings in recent memory. The fact that it's online for anyone to see is a real mind bender. 

Imagine popping in a VHS and watching as a camera lovingly pans over a table full of wooden instruments and a collection of jars containing something vaguely human. There are black and white photos tacked to a wall and a human head just sitting in some rope. Oh and don't forget the fish tank full of human hands. Flower of Flesh and Blood isn't a snuff film, but you try telling an early 90s (read: high on all the cocaine) Charlie Sheen that he didn't actually see a samurai drug a woman and then chop her up into little pieces. After viewing the horror film (which was given to him by Attack of the Show's Chris Gore) Sheen immediately called the FBI. The FBI investigated, but after realizing that no one was actually murdered in the making of the film, they quickly closed the case.

The video opens with a portly bald guy sitting in a recliner espousing his personal philosophy before cutting to footage of a series of women listening intently as that same man suggests that he's going to kill them if they don't cook, clean, and have sex with him and his friend whenever the two men want. Those men are Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who are believed to have raped and murdered up to 25 people between 1983 and 1985. Lake killed himself immediately upon arrest, but Ng stood trial and was convicted of 11 counts of murder. While there's no torture or any of the brutal mutilation that would happen to those women on the tapes, they're still some of the most chilling visuals you'll ever see. 

Poorly filmed videos of around 100 boys aged between nine and 15, all being sadistically abused and even murdered, were found when Italian police seized 3,000 of Dmitri Vladimirovich Kuznetsov's videos while they were in transit across Europe. British police allege that some of the videos were making their way to England where pedophiles were paying between £50 and £100 for Kuznetsov's tapes. According to The Guardian, Kuznetsov had been in the snuff film/child pedophilia business since 1998, and they published an alleged email transcript between Kuznetsov and an Italian customer:

"Promise me you're not ripping me off," says the Italian.

"Relax, I can assure you this one really dies," Kuznetsov responds.

"The last time I paid and I didn't get what I wanted."

"What do you want?"

'To see them die."

A bald guy in what might be a flesh mask hangs another man from the ceiling, rips his clothing off, and begins to scrape the skin from his body. So far, so good, right? But then Trent Reznor's voice booms over the video and things get really unsettling.

To advertise Nine Inch Nails' Broken EP, Reznor enlisted the help of Peter Christopherson of the band Throbbing Gristle to direct a short film that would act as a promo for the EP. Aside from being one of the preeminent figures in industrial music, Christopherson was also really good at making fake snuff films. So good that no one would agree to distribute the promo, leaving Reznor to hand-dub the tapes himself and give them out to friends. When the Internet finally came around, people were able to see that The Broken Movie is just some good ol' horrifying footage set to Nine Inch Nails b-sides.

Haeli Way, a teacher from Texas, had a relationship with two separate students on two separate ocassions. One of the physical relationships she had with a student was at, get this, a "student ministry camp" in Africa. The second victim, as it is noted, was invited on a hike by Ms. Way. It became apparent fairly rapidly that the hike wasn't just about exploring nature. Well, it was. Just a different kind of nature.
 

Anyone who's watched a television crime drama knows that when building a murder case, the police always look for a motive. But what happens when a killer has no motive? As this list of killers with no motives will shows, sometimes people kill out of boredom, curiosity - or simply for no reason at all...

While murderers who commit their crimes for anger, jealousy, revenge, or profit are terrifying, these murderers with no motive are truly the stuff of horror movies.

Donato Bilancia is known as Italy's worst serial killer. He was convicted of killing 17 people in 1997. His first murder victim allegedly cheated while playing cards with Bilancia, but investigators never established a motive for any of his other killings.

While some possible causes have been suggested for Bilancia's behavior - including shame at having a small penis - he seemed to have no particular reason for the murders and no pattern for whom he'd attack and why.

At his trial, Bilancia asked if doctors could explain why he did what he did.

The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs are two teenaged Ukrainian serial killers who killed 21 people in 2007 for seemingly no reason. They recorded many of the murders, and one of the videos ended up on the Internet.

Initially some theorized that the killers were trying to profit from making snuff videos, but police found no evidence to support that claim. Instead, Detective Bogdan Vlasenko said, "We think they were doing it as a hobby," while Deputy Interior Minister Nikolay Kupyanskiy added, "For these young men, murder was like entertainment or hunting."

Israel Keyes confessed to killing eight people all over the United States, and hinted that he had committed more murders. 

Keyes traveled extremely long distances to kill some of his victims, and he maintained weapons caches and body disposal kits in hidden spots all over the US. Yet despite that level of effort and preparation, Keyes could offer no real motive for his behavior. When asked why he killed, he would answer, "Why not?"

Keyes committed suicide in prison while awaiting trial for one of his crimes.

In 1979, sixteen-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer began shooting at students who attended the elementary school across the street from her house. Nine children were wounded, and a principle and a custodian died while protecting the children. Spencer told a reporter that she started shooting because she "didn't like Mondays" and that the shooting "livens up the day."

Craig Walter snapped and stabbed his best friend Maurice Wilson 17 times while he was drunk and high, because Wilson's optimistic outlook made him extremely angry.

Apparently, Walter had recently become paranoid enough to carry a knife around with him everywhere. After murdering his friend, Walter went directly to the police and tearfully confessed his crime.

Sailson Jose das Gracas confessed to killing 38 women in Brazil over a period of 10 years, as well as two men and a two-year-old child. He said he murdered simply because it was fun. He showed no remorse, and claimed that if he were ever released from jail, he'd go back to killing again.

Joanna Dennehy is a British serial killer who murdered for fun and notoriety. She killed three men in just two weeks and attempted to kill two others, all while bragging about her kills to multiple people, before she eventually confessed to the police and pleaded guilty.

According to testimony from one of her victims who survived the attack, she showed little emotion while stabbing him, saying simply, "Oh, look, you’re bleeding, I’d better do some more.”

Alfredo Galan murdered six people in Spain in 2003. He was dubbed the Playing Card Killer because he left a single playing card next to each of his victims.

When police began their investigation, they could find no apparent motive for the killing spree. After Galan was eventually apprehended, he said he just wanted "to know what it felt like to kill."

Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb were two highly intelligent students at the University of Chicago who kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old boy in 1924, in order to prove that they were capable of committing the perfect crime.

Leopold and Loeb spent seven months planning every aspect of the crime, from selecting a victim to deciding how to dispose of the body - but despite all their preparation, they still made a mistake. Leopold left his eyeglasses at the crime scene, and police quickly traced them and apprehended the pair.

In their confession, the killers said they committed murder as an "experiment." Leopold said, "It is just as easy to justify such a death as it is to justify an entomologist killing a beetle on a pin."



“I murder so that I may come back.”

 
In May of 1968, the day before Mary Bell turned 11, she strangled a 4-year-old boy named Martin Brown in an abandoned house. A short time later, she and a 13 year-old friend broke into an orphanage and smashed the place up. They left notes that claimed responsibility for Brown’s murder, but the police just assumed that it was a prank.
 
That July, the pair kidnapped and murdered 3-year-old Brian Howe and left his body on a nearby wasteland - but not before Mary mutilated him and carved an “M” into his stomach. 
 
She was only convicted with two counts of manslaughter, both because of her young age and her psychiatric evaluation, in which she showed all the common signs of psychopathy. She was held until the age of 23 and then set free, which she remains to this day.

"Instead of me being hurt, I was hurting someone else." 

 “All he alleged was that the child fouled the bed in which they lay together, that she was sulky, and that he did not like her.”

“This sure beats the hell out of Algebra.”

“Never has a person affected me so much. Always will there be something missing without you with me. My lawyer tells me we're legends, ha, closer to immortality it would seem.”

The Walkers and their two toddlers were murdered on December 19, 1959 in Osprey, Florida. The murder is of particular note because it potentially involved the suspects of the murders that inspired the creative non-fiction novel In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. The husband was stabbed, while the wife was raped and shot. The two prime suspects, Perry Smith and Richard "Dick" Hickock, had been convicted of the Clutter family murder that happened 35 days earlier in Holcombe, Kansas, just before they stole a car and drove to Florida.

Both men were hanged. However, DNA evidence could never support their convictions and the case has never been solved, until 2013, when the bodies were exhumed although the DNA evidence was inconclusive due to sample degredation.

There are some serial killers who will go down in history as the greatest monsters who have ever walked the earth, but none of them hold a candle to the scariest man to ever set foot in New Mexico, David Parker Ray. Also know as the Toy Box Killer, Ray kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered as many as 60 women from the mid-80s all the up to 1999, when he was finally captured after his final victim managed to escape and run down the highway in nothing but a dog collar. Together, these shocking facts about the Toy Box Killer form a picture of a man who saw the people around him as pawns in his sick game of manipulation, sex, and murder.

The story of David Parker Ray is a disturbing tale that only grows darker the more you look into it. He was a boogey man walking the earth, who used women as his own personal sex toys - but he also had friends who knew exactly what he was doing in his “toy box,” a 15-by-25-foot room devoted specifically to sexual torture. The amount of depravity and lack of concern for human life in this story is enough to make you lose all hope for humanity. There’s nothing light in this story about David Parker Ray; a man whose entire life was built around rape and torture. After you finish reading about the Toy Box Killer, you're never going to look at a locked shed the same way. 

Imagine waking up groggy and not being able to move. You realize that you're not wearing any clothing and then you hear this [warning: link leads to the full transcript, which is extremely disturbing and graphic]:

Hello there, b*tch. Are you comfortable right now? I doubt it. Wrists and ankles chained. Gagged. Probably blindfolded. You are disoriented and scared, too, I would imagine. Perfectly normal, under the circumstances. For a little while, at least, you need to get your sh*t together and listen to this tape. It is very relevant to your situation. I’m going to tell you, in detail, why you have been kidnapped, what’s going to happen to you, and how long you’ll be here. 

That's the opening of David Parker Ray's monologue to his new victims, where he would explain who he was, that he was playing a "torture game," and that the victims were about to be brutally raped and tortured for the foreseeable future. Full transcripts of the tape exist, but no audio has ever made it onto the web, either because the tapes were destroyed, lost, or simply too horrible to listen to. 

David Parker Ray only had one child from an early marriage, but boy was she a doozy! Glenda Jean "Jesse" Ray was 32 in 1999 when her father was arrested for his gruesome crimes, and it turns out that she had tried to warn the FBI about what he was up to way back in 1986. According to FBI agent Doug Beldon, "She alleged that David Parker Ray was abducting and torturing women and selling them to buyers in Mexico." Unfortunately the allegations were so non-specific that they couldn't act on her claims and stopped looking into Ray. 

By the time 1999 rolled around, Jesse Ray had gone from dropping dime on her dad to helping him kidnap and sexually assault women. After her father was arrested, Jesse was quickly captured and sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison, plus five years of probation in connection with her father's sex torture case. 

It's not just that David Parker Ray lived in New Mexico, a state full of empty space where a vast amount of weird stuff happens - it's that he lived in Elephant Butte, a town of 1,300 people that's backed up against a state park. That means that Ray had access to miles of abandoned land where he could dump bodies, and where there was no one around to witness any of his crimes. And if any of the women he was holding captive managed to escape, all of that land meant that there was nowhere to go. 

As hard as it might be to believe, David Parker Ray didn't work alone. Over the course of his tenure as New Mexico's scariest Parks Department employee, he met Cindy Hendy, a woman who was just as into torturing and raping young woman as he was. In his message to his victims, Ray mentions that they'll be servicing her just as much as they would be servicing him. Aside from Hindy, he also worked with Dennis Roy Yancy, and together they tortured and murdered Yancy's ex girlfriend, Marie Parker.

Something that gets glossed over in most of the reports about David Parker Ray is how much he was into the idea of brainwashing women. In the transcripts of his tapes, he details how he plans to let the women loose after he's finished with them, and it's eerily similar to MK-Ultra mind control techniques: 

I get off on mind games. After we get completely through with you, you’re gonna be drugged up real heavy, with a combination of sodium pentothal and phenobarbital. They are both hypnotic drugs that will make you extremely susceptible to hypnosis, autohypnosis, and hypnotic suggestion. You’re gonna be kept drugged a couple of days, while I play with your mind. By the time I get through brainwashing you, you’re not gonna remember a f*ckin’ thing about this little adventure. 

While there were a couple of women who managed to make it out of Ray's torture chamber alive, one actually believed that her memories of Ray's sexual abuse were no more than bad dreams until she was contacted by the FBI. 

Ray's first foray into sadomasochism came in the mid-50s when he was just a teenager. After his father left him and his sister to live with his elderly grandfather, Ray began to develop a secret fascination with sadomasochism. He even alleged to his first wife that it was around this age when he kidnapped a woman, tied her to a tree, and tortured and murdered her. There's no proof of Ray actually committing this crime, but even if he was just trying to include his first wife in his fantasies, Ray would go on to make that story look like child's play. 

One of Ray's most horrific forms of torture proves that he was so far beyond having basic humanity, he may have never been a normal human being. In his opening monologue to his victims, he would detail a "party" that he would throw every once in a while where a woman would be locked in a steel cage that held her body in position so he and his friends could watch as she was raped by one of his dogs. How his friends were able to justify all of this in their heads is mind-boggling. Maybe they had already seen so much, they were desensitized to even this sickening scenario. 

Charles Bukowski said, "Find what you love and let it kill you," and David Parker Ray took that advice and ran with it. In the torture shed next to his trailer, he spent upwards of $100,000 in order to build his dream space where he could work without ever worrying if his homemade breast electrocuter would work, or if his leg spreaders would rust.

Aside from the implements mentioned above, Ray kept sex toys, syringes, a fur-lined coffin where Ray would place his victims to torture them, and a box with a hole cut out to hold victims' heads. And the centerpiece of the entire toy box was the surgical steel gynecological chair where he would strap his victims before getting down to work. 

Despite not having any bodies to use as evidence against Ray in his trial, the FBI was still able to wrack up a pretty good case against New Mexico's most sadistic killer. Ray was put through three separate trials, one for each of his living victims. The first ended in a mistrial and a retrial where he was convicted of 12 of the acts of which he was accused. Then after the woman in his second trial died before she could take the stand, Ray agreed to a plea deal that would earn him 224 years in prison for numerous offenses involved in the abduction and sexual torture of three young women at his Elephant Butte Lake home.

One of the things that never changes from serial killer to serial killer is that they all work in the same patterns. Jeffrey Dahmer picked up his victims at a specific gay bar in the twin cities, John Wayne Gacy picked up teens at the bus stop, and David Parker Ray picked up women at the Blue Waters Saloon, a dive bar that catered to drifters and the few locals that lived in Elephant Butte. One of Ray's few living victims, Kelli Van Cleave, testified that Ray's daughter Jesse drugged her while she was drinking at the Saloon. And Marie Parker, ex-girlfriend of Ray's accomplice Dennis Roy Yancy, was also last seen at the Saloon.  

What is it about the worst of human nature that so many people find fascinating? Is it a quest to understand the depravity that roils around in the mind of a psychopath? Or perhaps it’s just a glimpse into the darkest parts of ourselves that makes weird or brutal true crimes so fascinating? Either way, whenever a strange crime or terrible act is committed, there’s some small part of us that can’t help but look at the terror.

Throughout history, normal people have sunk to ghastly depths to handle the world around them. We may not be able to comprehend why exactly people do these things, but that doesn’t change the fact that there’s something undeniably alluring about them. Read on for a list of some of the strangest crimes in history.

In January 1966, Philadelphia man Calvin Jones escaped charges of murder thanks to a really bizarre coincidence. Jones had previously been charged with the murder of 23-year-old Sarah Tolbert, his then-girlfriend. Apparently, he’d beaten her to death with a rubber hose.

When the young woman was autopsied, however, it was discovered that Jones’s beating hadn’t been what killed her. Instead, the coroner discovered that Tolbert had died of sickle-cell anemia at the exact moment she was being battered. As a result, Jones received the lesser charge of assault and battery.

In 1983, the body of Francisco Patino Gutierrez was found on a street in Hialeah, Florida. Nearby, a plastic bag was found taped to the back of a dumpster. Inside was a cryptic riddle reading, "Once you’re back on the track you’ll travel in night. So prepare your old self for a terrible fright... Now the motive is clear and the victim is, too. You’ve got all the answers. Just follow the clues.”

In context, the note and accompanying riddle were extremely unsettling. The case became known as the “Liquid Matthew Murder” thanks to a subsequent riddle clue that was located by police shortly after. The mystery vexed the police for weeks... until they released the notes in the local paper. 

It was then that authorities discovered that the scary little note was written for a church’s murder mystery game a month prior to the murder. Thanks to a rainstorm the night of the game, the notes hadn’t been collected and so they were still up when Gutierrez was murdered (presumably as a result of drug connections).

In October 2000, two housewives were murdered in a similar manner within days of one another. Neither woman had any known enemies. In fact, both were rather ordinary housewives living completely unconnected lives. They had only one thing in common. Both women were named Mary Morris.

An investigation into the matter turned up no evidence, and both cases remain unsolved. At the moment, the prevailing theory is that Mike Morris - husband of Mary Morris Number Two - hired a hit man to kill his wife. Unfortunately, the murderer made a mistake and killed the wrong Mary Morris first.

We've all seen this set-up so many times before: an idyllic family retreats to some secluded area for a few days of rest and relaxation only to encounter some sicko who’s hell-bent on murdering the entire clan. Tragically, that exact scenario played out in 1968, when the Robison family took up residence in a cottage deep in the forest of Blisswood Resort in Good Hart, Michigan.

As the family settled in, an unknown assailant shot and killed patriarch Richard C. Robison before terrorizing his entire family. By the end of the night, Robison’s wife and his four children were also gunned down.

While police suspected Robison’s business partner, Joe Scalero, of the crime, there was never enough evidence to convict him. Scalero committed suicide several years later, still professing his innocence.

In August of 2016, 22-year-old Jasmine Richardson was set free from a Canadian prison, ten years after she and her ex-boyfriend committed a heinous crime. In 2006, then-12-year-old Richardson and her boyfriend Jeremy Steinke murdered Richardson’s family in cold blood. 

In the months leading up to the horrible act, the Canadian pre-teen had made a quick transition from a bright, happy girl to a morbid goth kid. Authorities claimed that this transition was a result of 23-year-old Steinke’s influence. Steinke, in fact, believed himself to be a 300-year-old werewolf.

Whatever the reasons, this 12-year-old reportedly slashed her little brother’s throat one evening while Steinke stabbed her parents to death.

In 2010, Rodney Alcala was captured by police and brought to trial for an incredibly expansive list of crimes. By the time police had tallied up all of his potential victims, they discovered that Alcala had raped and possibly murdered as many as 130 victims between 1978 until his capture.

The weirdest bit of Alcala’s crime spree, though, was his appearance as a bachelor on The Dating Game, which he won.

In June 1981, Japanese citizen Issei Sagawa was caught in a Parisian park with two suitcases in his hands. Inside the suitcases were the dismembered body parts of a fellow student, Renée Hartevelt. Three days before he was caught with the bodies, Sagawa had shot and killed Hartevelt and then spent the intervening time eating various parts of her body.

For his crime, the affluent young man spent five years in a psychiatric hospital, after which time he was able to check himself out and return to his native Japan. Over the thirty years since his crime, Sagawa has not only enjoyed freedom, he’s become something of a minor celebrity, essentially crafting his own cottage industry from his notorious reputation. Everything from manga to paintings to macabre re-enactments in which Sagaw plays himself have been created in the wake of his crimes. 

Fans of American Horror Story are likely familiar with the legend of the Axeman of New Orleans, America’s own Bayou Jack the Ripper. Over the course of a decade, between 1911 and 1919, a mysterious drifter attacked and murdered several people, a lot of whom were Italian grocers, with no other apparent motive than carnage. And maybe a little racism.

At one point, the killer even sent a mocking letter to newspapers claiming that he would spare anyone in New Orleans who played jazz. As mysteriously as the Axeman appeared, though, he was gone, disappearing into myth in 1919 after the murder of a grocer named Mike Pepitone.

Oddly, one year later, a man named Joseph Mumfre was shot to death by Pepitone’s widow. While no evidence ever linked Mumfre to the other Axeman murders, lots of circumstantial evidence pointed in his direction.

Carl Tanzler was working at a hospital in 1930 when he fell in love with a young Cuban-American woman named Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos. When the couple met, de Hoyos was dying from tuberculosis (a terminal condition in the 1930s). Throughout the last year of her life, Tanzler showered the young woman with gifts and even purchased an expensive mausoleum when she died. 

After her death, Tanzler visited de Hoyos’s grave, singing Spanish love songs to her. He later claimed that her spirit encouraged him to remove her from the grave and take her home. So, one night, haunted by these ghostly requests, Tanzler carried de Hoyos’s corpse home in a wagon.

Over the next nine years, he replaced her skin with silk, stuffed her body with rags to keep its shape, and used perfumes to disguise the smell. It wasn’t until de Hoyos’s sister, Florinda, stormed into his home with police in tow that the body was discovered. Tanzler wasn’t actually prosecuted because the statute of limitations on his initial crime had already lapsed.

In the age of the internet, it’s hard to believe that hucksters and con men can still run a good game. Sure, lots of “deposed Nigerian princes” exist, but those are pretty much it, right? Apparently not, as one talented (and sadistic) con artist named Thierry Tilly made more than £4.3 million off the gullibility of a French aristocrat.

According to former rich person Christine de Védrines, Tilly convinced her (and ten members of her family) that she was the target of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by an evil cabal which was composed of various entities including other members of her own family. Tilly encited them to increasingly paranoid behavior, to the point that the group was barricading itself behind the doors of its ancestral home, Chateau Martel.

Over the course of a decade - from 1999 to 2009 - Tilly reportedly siphoned the family’s vast fortune into offshore accounts and even made off with the family’s historic jewels. He’s now serving 10 years in prison for extortion, imprisonment, and even occasional abuse, and Christine de Védrines and her family are completely broke.

For many readers who live outside the Lone Star State, the question that’s running through your head is probably, “What are the Texas killing fields?” They’re exactly what they sound like: a 25-acre stretch of land just off of Interstate 45 that’s known for being the prime place to dump the bodies of young women. Since the early '70s, more than 30 bodies of young women from the ages of 12 to 19 have been discovered in the fields, but only a few of their murders have ever been solved. Many people believe that the crimes are the work of a Texas serial killer, and despite a few career criminals coming forward to claim responsibility for the shocking true crimes, no one has ever been able to put all the pieces of this gruesome puzzle together.

One of the reasons for the lack of coherency in the Texas killing field cases is that there’s one missing link between all the crimes: multiple causes of death seem to point to a variety of murderers all ditching their victims' corpses into the old oil field and hoping for the best. Because so many of the murders linked to the late '70s and early '80s are so similar, it’s possible that there was a serial killer operating in the area at the time, but there are just as many clues pointing to multiple murderers using the killing fields as a common dumping ground. Read about these murders in the Texas killing fields and see if you can connect the dots.  

Georgia and Brooks vanished from a school bus stop in 1974 after their fellow students heard them discussing their plan to skip school that day. These two girls, aged 12 and 14, were the victims of some of the most brutal violence to occur in the killing fields. When their bodies were discovered two years later, it was obvious that they had been bludgeoned to death before being shot for good measure. 

In 1971, these two reportedly outdoorsy gals disappeared while hitchhiking, only to have their bodies discovered in the killing fields. One man, Edward Harold Bell, a convicted sex offender and murderer, claims to have killed Debbie and Maria (along with many of the other girls found in the fields), but he claims that he was "brainwashed" into committing the crimes. 

In letters written from a maximum security cell in Huntsville 17 years after the crime, Bell describes killing the girls: "I was 'Brainwashed' into killing Deby (sic) Ackerman and Maria Johnson in November 1971."

He then goes on to describe how he shot them and the place where their bodies were discovered. 

In what might be one of the quickest turn-arounds for the discovery of set of bodies in the killing fields, Lynette Bibbs and Tamara Fisher were discovered by a woman who lives in the area just days after they had each been shot in the head. Bibbs had been shot in the forehead and below the left ear, while Fisher was shot in the back of the head. At the time, police were unsure of whether the girls were murdered on the spot, or killed before being dumped in the fields later.

Investigators noted that blood trailed from Fisher's body to a nearby dirt road, but there was no blood leading away from Bibbs's body, so it's entirely possible that they were killed by two different people who just happened to be dumping bodies in the same spot. 

Krystal Baker was just 13 years old when she was beaten, raped, and strangled to death before being tossed out on the side of the road in South Texas. It took 26 years before police were able to connect Kevin Edison Smith, the man who committed the gruesome crime, to Baker with DNA samples that matched stains found on the dress and underwear that Krystal was wearing on the day her body was found. Smith was spared the death penalty because investigators believe that he may be connected to more of the unsolved murders that took place on the killing fields. 

 

The first known victim of the I-45 Killer to be found in the killing fields, Colette Wilson was a 13-year-old girl who went missing from her bus stop in June 1971. Her remains were discovered five months later, and it was apparent that she died from a gunshot wound to the head. The discovery of Collette's body would begin decades of horrific discoveries on this desolate stretch of highway. 

After a long shift at Gaido’s restaurant along the Galveston Seawall in 1986, Sikes was run off the road by John Robert King, who had been drinking all day. Sikes's car was found the next morning along Interstate 45, but her body was never recovered. While King confessed to the crime from a motel in El Paso, without a body, police weren't able to formally charge him with murder. 

In 1978, after two years of searching for 12-year-old Suzanne Bowers, her skeletal remains were discovered in a field near Alta Loma, Texas. According to the authorities, her cause of death was unknown, but she had suffered skull fractures that appeared to be gun shot wounds. At the time of her disappearance, Bowers had been walking to her grandmother's house to pick up her swimsuit. 

In 1988, Richerson was allegedly abducted from the parking lot of the Casa Del Mar Condominiums where she worked as a night manager. One of the other employees heard a female scream and car door slam shut while Richerson was still on duty. One of her shoes was found in the parking lot, but Richerson was never seen again. Her remains were never found and her disappearance remains unsolved. 

While going on a jog through the suburban area of Friendswood, Texas, 12-year-old Laura Smither disappeared from the road in front of her home before breakfast. Just over two weeks later, Smither's body was found by a father and son who were out on a walk and discovered what they though to be the body of a dead animal face down in a pool of water. While a suspect was arrested, no one was ever formally charged for Laura's murder. 

Fye was a 23-year-old cocktail waitress who disappeared October 10, 1983. She was presumed missing for months until a dog carried her skull to a nearby house on April 4, 1984. The medical examiner for her case noted that Fye had broken ribs and may have been beaten to death.