14 Completely Bizarre True Crime Stories

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.