Strange Murders
There’s no shortage of weird murder cases out there, and we thought we’d collate a few of the more bizarre ones in a single post. Be warned, some of these may be quite gruesome or uncomfortable to read.
The Acid Bath Murderer
John George Haigh was an English serial killer, who murdered six people between 1944 and 1949. Haigh murdered for profit. After his first murder, William McSwan, Haigh forged documents that gave him power of attorney and used that to sell McSwan’s property, making around £4000 (a lot of money in post-WWII Britain).
Haigh beat his first three victims to death. The last three were shot with a .38 Enfield revolver that belonged to his fourth victim. After they were dead, Haigh claimed he drank a cup of the victims’ blood and then put the bodies into a forty-five-gallon drum and poured concentrated sulphuric acid onto the bodies. This procedure was intense enough to melt human bones. A few days later, Haigh would return and empty out the sludge onto a waste-ground nearby.
Haigh was caught and although he pleaded insanity, he was found guilty and hanged in August 1949.
The Torture Mother
Gertrude Baniszewski oversaw the murder of sixteen-year-old Sylvia Likens. In 1965, Syliva and her sister, Jenny, were living with the Baniszewski family. Their father worked in a carnival and paid Gertrude $20 a week to look after his daughters. If the money was late, Gertrude would take her anger out on the girls. After a while, this ended up being only Sylvia.
Not only was this a case of child abuse, Gertrude encouraged her seven children to join in with the beatings. Neighbourhood kids, as young as ten, were invited over to join. The neighbours didn’t report the Baniszewskis.
In October 1965, Sylvia was beaten to death. The official cause of death was brain swelling, most likely a result of the beatings. To cover up Sylvia’s death, Gertrude had a neighbour call the police and tell them that Sylvia had run away. When the police arrived at the Baniszewski house, Jenny, Sylvia’s sister, managed to whisper to one of the officers “Get me out of here and I’ll tell you everything.”
Gertrude Baniszewski got twenty years in prison. After being released, she changed her name and moved to Iowa before dying of lung cancer in 1990.
Katherine Knight
Katherine Knight was the first Australian women to be sentenced to life without parole. Knight murdered her partner, John Price, by stabbing him thirty-seven times. Several hours after, Knight skinned Price and decapitated him. She then cooked up parts of his flesh and served it with baked potato, pumpkin, courgette, cabbage, yellow squash and gravy. She set the meals on the table with notes for both of Price’s children, preparing to serve his body to them.
Police arrived after Price’s employer became concerned that he hadn’t turned up to work that morning. The police found Knight in a comatose state with pills on the floor around her. Price’s head was found with vegetables in a still-warm pot on the stove.
Elizabeth Báthory
Elizabeth Báthory was a Hungarian countess during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Báthory holds the Guiness World Record for most prolific female serial killer. She tortured and killed hundreds of young girls. It is rumoured that she cut the girls’ fingertips off, had them run naked in the snow and bathed in virgin blood to stay young and performed sexual acts with some of the corpses.
After her husband’s death in 1604, Báthory’s cruelty started to come to light. Eventually, after claims were made that she had girls of noble blood, the King of Hungary ordered an investigation. It was determined that Báthory had killed more than six hundred girls with the assistance of her servants. She and her servants were arrested on the 30th December 1609. Her servants went to trial in 1611 and three of them were executed. Elizabeth Báthory, never stood trial, and was instead, put under house arrest for the rest of her life.
Recently, it has been put forward that the claims were not entirely accurate as Báthory held a great deal of power and land that her family wanted. The man investigating her was apparently in debt to some of her family members.
It is also rumoured that Elizabeth Báthory inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The Angel of Death
Donald Harvey is an American serial killer who worked as an orderly at Marymount Hospital in Kentucky during the seventies and eighties. Harvey claims to have killed eighty-seven patients, but the official estimate ranges from thirty-seven to fifty-four victims.
Harvey used multiple murder methods, such as; arsenic, cyanide, insulin, suffocation, turning off ventilators, morphine, poisons, a coat-hanger inserted into a catheter and putting Hepatitis B and/or HIV into IV fluids. Cyanide and arsenic were his favourite methods and he would administer them via food, injection or IV.
Harvey acquired the nickname the angel of death from his colleagues as he was often nearby when someone died.
Harvey was caught when John Powell died of cyanide poisoning in 1985. Police focused on Harvey who had been present at the time of poisoning and when many other patients mysteriously died. Digging further, the police found that each of the hospitals Harvey had worked at had very high fatality rates and that some of his acquaintances and lovers had perished very suddenly.
Harvey claimed that he was putting the hospital patients out of their misery, but still pleaded guilty to twenty-four hospital deaths and poisoning his neighbour. Harvey is serving life in prison.
