Dark Historical Facts for the Macabre History Fan

29. As a Child, Richard Ramirez Often Slept in Cemeteries, and Was Mentored by a Monster

Ricardo “Richard” Leyva Munoz Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1960. He was the youngest of five children. His father, a former Mexican cop who emigrated to the US and got a job as a railway man, was a violent alcoholic who often flew into drunken rages, and beat his wife and children. To escape his father’s uncontrollable fits, a young Ramirez often snuck out of home at night and go sleep in a nearby cemetery. That macabre environment contributed to what became a lifelong fascination with death. He also began to smoke weed and drink alcohol at age ten.

As if that was not bad enough, when the future serial killer was twelve-years-old, he fell under the influence of an older cousin, Miguel “Mike” Ramirez, who was already a psychopathic serial killer. A decorated Vietnam War Green Beret, Mike Ramirez had raped, murdered, mutilated, and dismembered numerous Vietnamese girls and women, and documented what he did to his victims, step by step, with Polaroid photos. Photos which he showed his young cousin, along with graphic descriptions of his wartime atrocities. Richard was not repelled by the gory images but was instead drawn to and fascinated by them.

28. The Macabre Mentorship of a War Criminal

Twelve-year-old, Richard Ramirez, bonded with his older cousin, Mike, over marijuana and beer. The former Green Beret and war criminal not only regaled his younger relatives with gruesome war stories of mayhem, murder, and mutilation but also gave him tips and lessons on how to kill with stealth. He told Richard: “Having power over life and death was a high, an incredible rush. It was Godlike. You controlled who’d live and who died.” The macabre mentorship was interrupted in 1973, when Mike got into an argument with his wife and fatally shot her in the face in front of the then thirteen-year-old Richard.

Mike Ramirez was tried for the murder of his wife, but he got away with it because he was deemed not guilty by reason of insanity, caused in large part by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from his Vietnam War years. He spent four years in the Texas State Mental Hospital and was released in 1977. He promptly resumed his mentorship of Richard, who by then had fallen under the influence of yet another horrible older relative – this one a peeping Tom.

27. From Mentorship by a War Criminal, to Mentorship by a Peeping Tom

When his older cousin, Mike Ramirez, got locked up in a mental facility, a young Richard Ramirez became even more withdrawn from his family. In late 1973, he moved in his with older sister, Ruth, and her husband Roberto. Roberto was a voyeur who liked to spy on women as they undressed or performed other intimate activities. A peeping Tom, in short. He initiated his young brother-in-law in his voyeurism and took Richard with him on nighttime walks to catch peeks of unsuspecting women through windows.

As Richard hit the hormonal explosion of his teen years, the influences of his violent war criminal mentor, Mike Ramirez, and his degenerate peeping-Tom mentor, Roberto started to seriously mess him up. His teenage fantasies took flight, and began to combine voyeurism with violent forced bondage and forcible violation of women. Around this time, he began to use LSD and developed a strong interest in the occult and Satanism. When Mike Ramirez was released from a mental hospital in 1977, he resumed his mentorship of Richard and began to accompany both him and Roberto on nighttime peeping Tom expeditions.

26. From Voyeurism to Burglary, Child Molestation, and Violating Women

In his teens, Richard Ramirez got a job at a Holiday Inn, and began to put the lessons on stealth taught to him by his former Green Beret cousin, Mike, to practical use in burglaries. He used his hotel passkey to sneak into guests’ rooms as they slept, went through their possessions, and stole their valuables. He also began to molest underage guests, and on at least one occasion, fondled two children in an elevator, but was not charged or prosecuted. He finally got fired from the Holiday Inn when he tried to force a woman in her hotel room.

She was saved by her husband’s timely return. The husband beat the daylights out of Ramirez until the would-be perpetrator was knocked out senseless. The police then arrived and took him into custody. Prosecutors hit him with a variety of felonies that could have put him away for a long time – and in so doing probably spared many victims in years to come. Unfortunately, the charges were eventually dropped because the couple, who were from out of state, did not want to go back to Texas to testify against Ramirez.

25. Graduation to Full Blown Serial Killer

Richard Ramirez moved to California in his early twenties, and eventually ended up in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. There, on April 10, 1984, he committed the first – or at least the first known – murder in what would become a long list of victims. His victim was a nine-year-old girl, Mei Leung, whom he lured to the basement of the building in which he lived. There, he beat, strangled, assaulted, and stabbed her to death, then hung her corpse from a pipe. The crime differed from what became known as Ramirez’s standard operating procedure and was not attributed to him until 2009.

In June 1984, two months after he killed Leung, Ramirez began to commit a long list of gruesome murders that made him famous – or infamous – as the Night Stalker. In a series of macabre nighttime home invasions that lasted through August 1985, he terrorized first the Greater Los Angeles area, and then the San Francisco Bay area. He assaulted, mutilated, and killed with a variety of weapons that included not only firearms and knives, but also machetes, hammers, and tire irons.

24. A Juror’s Macabre Attraction to a Monster

Richard Ramirez was finally undone by a fingerprint that he left on the windshield of a stolen car used in his murder spree. His mug shots from earlier unrelated arrests were widely publicized in California, and he was spotted by Los Angeles citizens on August 31, 1985. After a wild chase that involved multiple failed carjacking attempts, he was captured by members of the public, and beaten half to death before the police arrived. He was eventually charged with thirteen murders, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries.

Despite all the gory details that came out in the trial, one of the jurors, Cindy Haden, fell madly in love with the macabre murderer. On Valentine’s Day, 1989, she gave him a cupcake with “I Love You” iced on the top. She still voted him guilty on all counts, but her passion for him did not wane. After the trial – for which Ramirez was sentenced to nineteen death sentences – Haden got a private detective license just so she could visit the Night Stalker in prison in the company of his lawyers.

23. The Macabre Women Who Loved the Night Stalker

Former juror Cindy Haden’s plan to get closer to Richard Ramirez worked. As a licensed private detective, she accompanied the convicted serial killer’s defense attorney on prison visits, and when the lawyer left the room to use the bathroom, Haden kissed and groped with the Night Stalker. When asked if she had been scared to have been left alone in a room with a serial killer whom she had personally voted to convict, Haden replied: “No, absolutely not. He’d never hurt me”. Haden might have fallen head over heels for Ramirez, the only serial killer she knew. But he was not as madly in love with her. However, she was not the only macabre admirer who lusted after him.

By the time his trial began in 1988, the Night Stalker had numerous fans who regularly wrote and visited him. One of them, Doreen Lioy, wrote him about 75 letters. He proposed to her, and they eventually got married in 1996 in San Quentin State Prison. She loudly proclaimed that she would commit suicide when Ramirez was executed, but she left him in 2009 after DNA proved that he had raped and murdered nine-year-old Mei Leung. Ramirez was not executed, as cancer got him in 2013 before California’s gas chamber did. By then, he was engaged to yet another fan, a twenty-three-year-old writer named Christine Lee.

22. There is a Psychological Term for the Macabre Attraction to Horrible People

The kinds of women attracted to monsters like Richard Ramirez are commonly referred to as “prison groupies”. However, there is a psychological term for what draws them to monsters: hybristophilia. It describes a paraphilia – an intense attraction to unusual objects, situations, fantasies, behaviors, or people-centered around people who commit crimes. The term combines the Greek words hubrizein, or the infliction of outrages upon others, and philo, a strong affinity or preference for something. For hybristophiliacs, sexual arousal and orgasm are facilitated by, and are sometimes exclusively contingent upon, a partner known to have committed dark deeds.

The condition explains the copious amounts of fan mail that are sent to high-profile evil prisoners like Ramirez – correspondence that is often amorous or intimate in nature. The hybristophliacs who send such mail are attracted to and turned on by such monsters precisely because of the vile acts that they had committed – acts that repel most normal people. Some macabre admirers – as actually happened twice in the case of Ramirez – go on to marry or become affianced to the objects of their affection in prison. Another serial killer, Jeffrey Dhamer, had amorous women send him letters, gifts, money, and proposals of marriage – despite the fact that he was a homosexual.

21. The Macabre Groupie Who Creeped Out Ted Bundy

Serial killer and necrophile, Ted Bundy, kidnapped, assaulted, and murdered dozens of girls and young women across America. He sometimes revisited his dead victims and had his carnal way with their decomposing corpses. Before he was executed in 1989, Bundy confessed to 30 homicides, but the true number of his victims is unknown and is probably much higher. Yet, despite the horrific and macabre nature of his crimes – not least of them the doing the deed with rotting cadavers bit – there was no shortage of women who threw themselves at him. A handsome man, he had innumerable groupies who flocked to his trial. He even got married and fathered a daughter while on death row.

One of them, named Janet, was so obsessive that she even creeped out Ted “Likes-Sex-With-Decomposing-Corpses” Bundy. She had previously written him a fan letter, and when he responded, she was overjoyed. She wrote back: “I kissed (the letter) all over and held it to me. I don’t mind telling you I am crying. I just don’t see how I can stand it anymore. I love you so very much, Ted“. She sat in the courtroom and ogled him so intensely that he told his lawyers that he thought she wanted to wear his skin. As he put it: “There she sits contemplating me with her mad eyes like a deranged seagull studying a clam. I can feel her spreading hot sauce on me already“.

More of Ted Bundy:

• 6 Facts about Serial Killer Ted Bundy
• 40 Disturbing Facts About Ted Bundy

20. When a Mob of Citizens Killed and Ate Their Ruler

As anybody who keeps with current news – or anybody who has not been in a coma, for that matter – is aware, tempers have gotten quite heated the past few years in American politics. Still, for all the aroused passions, things have not gotten anywhere close to as bad as that time a century and a half ago when Americans went hammer and tongs at each other in the Civil War. By the time the dust settled after that conflict, anywhere from 650,000 to a million people had lost their lives.

Those casualty numbers would be the equivalent of up to nine million or ten million dead Americans if prorated to 2021 population figures. But hot as tempers have recently gotten, they never got so heated that an American mob lynched an unpopular head of government, then proceeded to cook and eat him. Not so with the good people of the Netherlands. Despite their national reputation for orderliness and politeness, a Dutch mob once seized the country’s prime minister and did a macabre number on him in 1672.

19. A Macabre Feast

Johan de Witt (1625 – 1672) was a major political figure in the mid-seventeenth century’s Dutch Republic, a prosperous period that came to be known as the Dutch Golden Age. He controlled the government from 1650 until shortly before his death in 1672, and his main priority in those years was to decentralize and shift power from the central government to local ones. His decentralization agenda however led him to neglect the Dutch army and navy. When the Third Anglo-Dutch War erupted, the result was a series of military catastrophes in 1672.

Things got so bad that 1672 became forever after known in Dutch history as rampjaar – “disaster year”. It was against that backdrop that Johan de Witt went to visit his brother Cornelis, who had recently been sentenced to exile, on August 20^th, 1672. An angry mob spotted and seized the brothers, then shot, stabbed, and beat them to death. It then strung up their corpses upside down from a gibbet, disemboweled them, ripped off their genitalia, and roasted and ate their livers and other parts in a cannibalistic frenzy.

18. One of History’s Darker Episodes

History is full of dark and sad episodes, and one of the darker and more macabre ones was the transatlantic slave trade, which lasted for almost four hundred years from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. It was part of a triangular exchange that linked the New World, Europe, and Africa. Raw goods were shipped from the New World to Europe, and manufactured goods were shipped from Europe to Africa, where they were traded for slaves who were then shipped to the New World.

Upon their arrival in the New World, the slaves were made to toil in often horrific conditions, to produce more raw goods for shipment to Europe, and continue the cycle. While it lasted, the transatlantic slave trade saw the transportation of an estimated 12 – 15 million Africans to the New World for a life of slavery that was often dark, cruel, brutal, and short. At least it was for those who survived the horrific Middle Passage from Africa to the New World, during which millions of slaves perished.

17. The Macabre Passages of Slaves From Africa to the New World

The journey of Africans from what the Europeans referred to as the Dark Continent to the New World was broken into three macabre stages, that were often referred to as passages. Each of the passages was marked by its own cruelties and challenges, but it was the Middle Passage that was most infamous for the depths of inhumanity in that stage of the slaves’ journey. The process began with the First Passage, in which captive Africans were marched to the coast to get taken aboard ships.

The Middle Passage saw the Africans crammed into slave ships, packed like sardines to maximize the number of human cargo units, and chained in place in horrific conditions. The Final Passage was the surviving slaves’ journey from ports of disembarkation in the New World, such as Charleston, South Carolina, to the plantations or other destinations where they would be put to work. Depending on weather conditions and the prevailing winds, slave ships packed with chained unfortunates could take from one to six months to complete the Middle Passage.

16. The Vile Conditions in the Holds of Slave Ships

The journey of slaves from Africa to the New World was often described as hellish, and for once, the word was not used as literary hyperbole. Few things were darker, grimmer, and more macabre than the hold of a slave ship during the Middle Passage. To save space, slaves were chained by their ankles in pairs, and shackled to a post. Some ships allowed the slaves to move about during the day, but most kept them shackled in place for the entire journey. They were fed one meal a day with water, if at all.

Bodily functions had to be performed in place, and the chained Africans often spent the entire journey soiled in urine, vomit, and excrement. Diseases in the slave holds were rife, and mortality rates were high. Crews avoided entry into the dark and fetid human cargo holds, and slaves sometimes spent days shackled to rotting corpses. The stench was horrific, and sailors in other vessels frequently stated that they were able to smell slave ships from miles away, long before they hove into view.

15. Short Rations Aboard Slave Ships Often Transformed Already Macabre Conditions Into Nightmarish Ones

It was important to take on enough food and water for the macabre Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean. However, since a slave ship’s voyage was a commercial venture driven by the profit motive, investors seldom wanted to spend more money on supplies than was absolutely necessary to get their human cargo to the New World. Many times, they erred on the side of too little than too much. The results were often catastrophic for the chained slaves in the ship’s hold, and piled even more misery atop their already nightmarish load.

If food and water became scare on slave ships during the Middle Passage, the ship’s crew took care of themselves first. When transatlantic sailings took longer than expected and sustenance ran low, slave ship captains often turned to cruel and cold calculations in order to salvage what they could of their human cargo. As seen below, in order to figure out how to stretch the remaining food and water in order to arrive at port with at least some live slaves to sell, slavers were not above turning to cold-blooded murder.

14. The Middle Passage’s Macabre Calculations

A slave ship captain whose vessel ran low on food or water while crossing the Atlantic often turned to macabre calculations. Once he figured out that the remaining victuals could sustain only a certain number of slaves, the dark logic of the situation called for the disposal of the excess human cargo. So they were thrown overboard, to drown or be devoured by the sharks that routinely trailed slave ships. The most infamous and best-documented incident of slavers throwing live Africans overboard occurred on the slave ship Zong, in late November 1781.

The ordeal began on November 29^th, and lasted for days, during which the ship’s captain went on a killing spree in which he had over 130 Africans thrown overboard to drown in the Atlantic. The event, which came to be known as the Zong Massacre, shocks modern sensibilities. At the time, however, such occurrences were sufficiently common that this instance would probably have been forgotten, save for one twist. An insurance fight erupted between the ship’s owners and their insurance company.

13. A Longer-Than-Expected Voyage’s Hellish Consequences

The Zong Massacre was saved from vanishing into historic obscurity only because, when the ship finally reached port in Jamaica, its owners filed an insurance claim to recover the value of the slaves whom their captain had thrown overboard. It was the subsequent litigation, and the legal precedents set, that preserved the details of the Zong Massacre for posterity. The record shows that the Zong was owned by Liverpool’s Gregson Slave-Trading Syndicate. In what was common business practice at the time, the syndicate took out insurance on the lives of their human cargo.

The Zong, with a crew of 17 men captained by a Luke Collingwood, a former ship’s surgeon, set sail with 244 slaves in its hold. The voyage was Collingwood’s first command at sea. Between the new commander’s inexperience, navigational mistakes, and a crew that was considered too small by contemporary standards for a vessel the size of the Zong, the Atlantic crossing took longer than expected. As a result, food and water provisions ran low. So the captain decided to reduce the number of mouths to feed and water, and threw 130 Africans overboard.

12. A Jury Determined That it Was OK to Throw Slaves Overboard to Drown

When the owners of the Zong filed an insurance claim for the murdered slaves, the insurers refused to pay on grounds that the claimants had killed the slaves they now wanted to get paid for. So the Gregson syndicate sued – and won in a jury trial. In Gregson v Gilbert (1783) 3 Doug. KB 232, the jury decided that the macabre expedience of throwing slaves overboard to drown was legal in the circumstances of the case, which meant that the insurers could be made to pay up.

The insurers appealed the trial court’s verdict, and sought to have it set aside and for the case to be retried. In a hearing before the Court of the King’s Bench, the Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield, and two other King’s Bench judges reversed the lower court’s decision. The reversal was not made on grounds of humanity, or because the slavers had committed murder. Instead, the court reversed based on newly introduced evidence that showed that the slaves had been thrown overboard because of the ship captain’s negligence.

11. Nobody Was Prosecuted for the Zong Massacre, But it Nonetheless Set the Stage for the Abolition Movement

After the jury verdict was reversed on appeal, the Zong case was sent back to the lower court for a new trial. There is no evidence that another trial was ever held. By then, thanks to the efforts of a former slave named Olaudah Equiano, word of the Zong Massacre had spread. Led by anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp, the abolitionists demanded justice for the drowned slaves, and sought to have the ship’s crew prosecuted for murder. Their efforts to secure justice for the drowned slaves were unsuccessful, and nobody was ever criminally prosecuted for the killings.

Granville Sharp wrote both the Prime Minister and the Admiralty, but received no response. His attempts to get newspapers interested in the macabre episode also met with little success. However, thanks to his efforts and those of other activists, the massacre eventually began to attract national and international attention. As the macabre details of what had happened became more widely known, many were shocked into taking a stand against slavery, and they coalesced to launch the abolition movement. It was a gradual and long slog that took decades. Eventually, the British Royal Navy was tasked with the suppression of the international slave trade in 1807, and in 1833, Parliament abolished slavery in the British Empire.

You May Also Interested: The British Abolitionist Who Devoted His Life to Ending Slavery.

10. A Controversial Holy Father

Holy Father Stephen VI’s time on the papal throne was not that long, and lasted for little more than a year between his election as pope in May, 896, until his death in August, 897. However, that was more than enough time to secure his place in the books, with one of the most controversial and macabre episodes in a papal history that has no shortage of controversy. It took place during a period, from roughly the middle of the ninth century to the middle of the tenth, that was marked by severe political instability in the Italian Peninsula.

Popes in this period were appointed and dethroned in rapid succession, based on the obscure machinations and intrigues of provincial Italian and Roman aristocratic families. Those rustics did not view the papacy and popes through our current global prism. Instead, to the factions in Rome and the surrounding region, the Holy See was simply another tool to be used to further their parochial ambitions and to thwart the ambitions of their rivals. Historical sources are relatively scarce as to the details of just what those rivalries revolved around, but the gist of them covered the basics: wealth, power, and prestige.

9. Formosus, Stephen VI’s Enemy to the Death, and Beyond

Pope Stephen VI hated a former Holy Father, Pope Formosus, who was born in Rome in 816. Formosus rose within the Catholic Church’s hierarchy to Cardinal Bishop of Porto, Rome’s port city and main harbor, in 864. Two years later, Pope Nicholas I appointed him papal legate and missionary to the pagan Bulgar tribes. He was so successful at it, that the converted Bulgarians clamored to have him appointed as their bishop. However, technicalities in the Catholic Church’s laws forbade that. In years to come, Formosus’s enemies used that success in converting the Bulgars, and his popularity with them, against him.

They asserted that he had corrupted the minds of the Bulgars “so that as long as he was alive, they would not accept any other bishop from the apostolic see“. Formosus was also alleged to have conspired with others to usurp the authority of Pope John VIII, and to have plundered church property. Between those charges and the Bulgar-related allegations, he was excommunicated. He was restored to the Church’s good graces after John VIII’s death in 882, and resumed his bishopric of Porto, which he held until he was elected pope in 891.

8. The Papal Beef Between Stephen VI and Formosus

Pope Stephen VI was born into the ruling family of Spoleto, an independent duchy in central Italy. In 891, an earlier Pope Stephen V had reluctantly crowned Guy III, Duke of Spoleto as Holy Roman Emperor. However, his preference had actually been for the East Frankish King Arnulf of Carinthia. When Formosus became pope, he was lukewarm at best towards the Spoletan Emperor Guy, and like Stephen V before him, he also preferred Arnulf. In 892, Guy and the Spoletans forced Pope Formosus to crown Guy’s underage son Lambert as co-emperor. While at it, the Spoletans also forced him to make their relative, Stephen, the future pope and persecutor of Formosus’s corpse, a bishop. Resenting the Spoletans’ ham-handedness, Formosus persuaded Arnulf to invade Italy and liberate it from the Spoletans.

Arnulf complied, and in 894, he invaded and occupied northern Italy. Guy died later that year, and left his son Lambert in the care of his mother. Mother and child proved no match for Arnulf, who defeated their forces, and seized Rome in 895. Formosus promptly ditched the Spoletans, and crowned Arnulf Holy Roman Emperor in Saint Peter’s basilica. The new emperor then set out to mop up the Spoletans, only to suffer a stroke, which paralyzed him and forced him to end the campaign. Formosus himself died a few months later, in 896. He was succeeded by Boniface VI, who lasted only 15 days as Holy Father, before he died of gout. He was followed by the Spoletan Stephen VI, who was livid at Formosus for what he perceived as an unforgivable offense against, and betrayal of, his family.

7. The Macabre Trial of a Corpse

Pope Formosus was dead, but that did not stop the Spoletan Pope Stephen VI from giving him a piece of his mind. He ordered the rotting corpse of Formosus exhumed, and had it hauled to the papal throne. There, in one of the papacy’s weirdest episodes, the remains were subjected to an ecclesiastical trial before the Roman clergy, that came to be known as the “Cadaver Synod”. With Formosus’ reeking corpse propped on the throne, Stephen VI conducted the prosecution, while a teenage deacon, placed behind the dead pope, conducted the defense. Stephen’s list of charges against Formosus was long, and included perjury; serving as bishop while actually a layman; transmigration of sees in violation of canon law; and of generally having been unworthy of the pontificate.

The proceedings were just as ghoulishly farcical and macabre as one might imagine. The unhinged Stephen would scream the accusations against Formosus’ cadaver, then the deacon hiding behind the dead pope, imitating Formosus’ voice, would deny the charges. To no one’s surprise, Formosus’s corpse, being a corpse, lost the case, and was found guilty. An ancient Roman penalty, damnatio memoriae, meaning “condemnation of the memory” and typically decreed by the Senate against those who brought dishonor upon the state, was applied. Stephen VI then had the papal vestments stripped from Formosus’ corpse, to be replaced with rags. Next, he ordered the amputation of three fingers from Formosus’ right hand, which he had used in consecrations. Then he had the body dumped in a pauper’s grave.

6. Pope Stephen VI Took Vindictiveness to Macabre Heights

The macabre trial, conviction, and punishment of Formosus’s corpse failed to satisfy Pope Stephen VI and sate his vindictiveness for long. Soon thereafter, still raging at the deceased Holy Father’s insult to the Spoleto family, he again had Formosus’ corpse dug up, then ordered it loaded down with stones and tossed into the Tiber river. The man was clearly insane, and his bizarre behavior led to widespread rioting that finally ended with his ouster. The rioters got a hold of Stephen VI, and he was stripped of his papal vestments, imprisoned, and strangled to death in his cell.

Pope Stephen VI and the Cadaver Synod might have been the era’s weirdest pope and papal episode, but neither would prove to be the worst in a period that is often described as the nadir of the papacy. In the following few decades, before serious reform efforts were finally made, the woeful list of Stephen VI’s successors would include Pope Sergius III, who murdered two predecessors and fathered an illegitimate child (who would go on to become pope). Another pope, John XII, became a serial rapist and murderer and transformed the papal palace into a de facto brothel. Yet another Holy Father, Benedict IX, sold the papacy in order to fund his retirement.

Also Read: 8 Dreadful Papal Scandals From the Middle Ages.

5. The Macabre Angel of Death

Josef Mengele (1911 – 1979), an SS extermination camp doctor, gained the macabre moniker the “Angel of Death”. The son of a Bavarian farm machinery manufacturer, Mengele grew up in comfort, and developed an early passion for music, skiing, and art. He studied philosophy in university, and joined the Brown Shirts in 1934. A year later, he received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Munich, which got him into the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. It was the start of a dark journey.

In 1938, Mengele joined the SS, and during World War II, he served as a combat doctor on the Eastern Front until he was wounded in 1943. After he recovered from his injuries, he was transferred to Auschwitz as camp doctor. There, he greeted new arrivals and cursorily sorted out those who got to live as slave laborers from those to be sent immediately to the gas chambers. He was also a sadist who conducted gratuitously cruel and deadly human experiments upon the camp’s prisoners, with little regard to the safety or well-being of his victims. Unfortunately, as seen below, he got away with it.

4. A War Criminal Who Got Away With It

Josef Mengele ended up in a British POW camp after the war. However, he hid his true identity with an assumed name, so his stint in captivity was relatively brief before he was released. He then went into hiding, helped by a network of Nazi sympathizers in the Vatican. He eventually made it to South America and settled in Argentina in 1949. By the early 1950s, Mengele had resumed living under his real name and made a good living as a salesman for his family’s farm equipment business, Karl Mengele & Sons. He also acquired an interest in a pharmaceutical company.

In 1960, however, Mengele’s deeds in Auschwitz became more publicly known, and West German prosecutors sought to have him arrested and extradited. Between that and fears that the Israelis – who had recently seized Adolf Eichmann in Argentina – might be after him, Mengele went on the lam once again. This time, he headed to Brazil, where with the help of Nazi sympathizers, he settled down and purchased a coffee and cattle farm in Sao Paulo. He was never held accountable for his crimes and died in a swimming accident in 1979.

3. The Hooker Addicted Serial Killer

Throughout history, it is unlikely that there were that many people who have ever been as obsessed with hookers as Gary Ridgway (1949 – ) was. Unfortunately for the working women, he came in contact with, his obsession was of the extremely macabre kind: that of a prolific serial killer with his target population. Ridgway, also known as “The Green River Killer”, was convicted of the murder of 48 women, most of them prostitutes. He would eventually confess to the murder of 71 sex workers.

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Ridgway grew up in a poor neighborhood and was raised by parents who often engaged in violent arguments. He had peed in his bed until he was thirteen years old, and whenever he wet the sheets, Ridgway’s mother would wash his genitals. He informed psychologists that in his teens, he had been sexually attracted to his mother, even as he fantasized about killing her. His father, a bus driver, often complained about the proliferation of prostitutes in and around the neighborhood.

2. A Macabre Killer Who Had His Way With Corpses

Gary Ridgway was a dyslexic child, with an IQ in the 80s. His violent criminality began in the 1960s, when at age sixteen, he led a six-year-old boy into the woods and stabbed him in the liver. The child survived, and stated that Ridgway had laughed as he walked away. After high school, Ridgway joined the Navy and was sent to Vietnam, where he served aboard a supply ship. Upon his discharge, he got a job painting trucks, and spent 30 years in that occupation. He was a family man, although one who had trouble keeping a marriage going; he was married three times. He was also a regular churchgoer who was described by many who knew him as a religious fanatic.

Ridgway was into ladies of the night, and long before he began to kill them, he was a frequent customer of these working women. His macabre career as a serial killer began in the early 1980s. He would pick up these women, runaway teenagers, or other vulnerable women, along Route 99 in King County, Washington. He took them to his home, where he usually choked them to death with his bare hands, although he sometimes garroted them with a cord or wire. He dumped the bodies in remote forested areas in King County, and often returned to the corpses to have his macabre way with them.

1. The Belated Capture of the Green River Killer

The authorities began to suspect that a serial killer was on the loose when sex workers and teenage runaways began to disappear along Route 99. After the first five bodies surfaced in the Green River, the press dubbed the unknown culprit “The Green River Killer”. In 1987, suspicion fell upon Ridgway, when many of the working women who worked along Route 99 – which he drove to and from work – described a suspect who resembled him. When investigators scrutinized Ridgway’s work record, they discovered that the disappearance of many victims coincided with his days off. He was taken into custody, but passed a polygraph test, and allowed investigators to take hair and saliva samples. He was released for lack of evidence and was soon back on the prowl.

Finally, in 2001, a new generation of detectives, who had been children when Ridgway first began to murder women, made more effective use of computers in the Green River Killer investigation. They also had access to modern DNA techniques that had not existed in the 1980s. When Ridgway’s hair and saliva samples, carefully preserved since 1987, were sent for DNA analysis, they returned a match that tied him to 4 victims. He was arrested, and entered a plea bargain in which he disclosed the locations of dozens of still-missing women. In exchange, he was spared the death penalty and was sentenced instead to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

_________________

Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

The Tab – Everything that Night Stalker left out about Richard Ramirez and his murders

About – Gary Ridgway, The Green River Killer

Anstey, Roger – The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760 – 1810 (1975)

Black Past – The Zong Massacre

Carlo, Philip – The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez (1996)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Josef Mengele

Foreman, Laura – Serial Killers: Profiles of Today’s Most Terrifying Crimes (1992)

History Collection – Andrew Jackson’s Inaugural Reception Foreshadowed Dark Things to Come

Isenberg, Sheila – Women Who Love Men Who Kill (2000)

Linedecker, Clifford L. – Prison Groupies: The Shocking True Story of the Women Who Love America’s Deadliest Criminals (1993)

Listverse – Top 10 Serial Killers Who Had Even Creepier Admirers

Llewellyn, Peter – Rome in the Dark Ages (1970)

Medievalists – The Cadaver Synod: Low Point in the History of the Papacy

National Geographic History Magazine, August 20^th, 2019 – Inside the Cadaver Synod, the Trial of a Dead Pope’s Body

PBS – Africans in America: Living Africans Thrown Overboard

Rowen, Herbert H. – John de Witt: Statesman of the “True Freedom” (1986)

Thought Co – Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer

Understanding Slavery Initiative – The Zong Case Study

Wikipedia – Cadaver Synod

Wikipedia – Hybristophilia

Wikipedia – Richard Ramirez