, which hit the cinemas in 2008, features a nightmare scenario in which a young couple in a remote woodland cabin are terrorised by three masked criminals who have seemingly chosen their victims at random and intend to cause them as much suffering as possible for no reason other than the pleasure it gives them.
7. SLAUGHTER
AT HINTERKAIFECK
The mass-killing at
the isolated rural community of Hinterkaifeck in the Ingolstadt region of Bavaria
in March 1922 is one of the most infamous crimes in German history. It is also the most mysterious.
In the days leading up to the dread event, 63-year-old
Andreas Gruber, owner of the farm in question, complained to neighbours that he
thought his home was haunted, having encountered what at the time seemed like unexplained phenomena - footprints in the snow encircling the
farm, noises in the attic and missing sets of keys. With the advantage of
hindsight, we can now assume that these oddities were down to a very
human perpetrator, who was scoping out the property in anticipation of
a planned home-invasion – which finally came on the evening of March 31.
Whatever
the purpose behind the attack, Andreas and his family, his wife, Cazilia (72),
their daughter, Viktoria Gabriel (35), her two young children, Cazilia and
Josef, and the maid, Maria (44), were taken to the barn in twos, where they
were all hacked to death with a mattock or pickaxe. The ghastly scene was
finally discovered four days later by concerned neighbours, and a massive
police investigation, headed up by Munich CID, swung into action.
Though, rather amazingly, detectives have pursued leads in the case as recently as 1986, no arrests
have ever been made because none of the known facts make much
sense. It was initially assumed that robbery was the motive, and that either a
vagrant or maybe someone living locally was responsible. However, considerable money was then found at the murder scene - there had been no theft. Odder still,
evidence suggested that the culprit had remained on the property for several days afterwards, presumably sleeping in the family beds,
eating their food, warming himself by their fire and even feeding and milking
their cattle. This revelation baffled the Grubers’ neighbours, as it seemed to contradict
the disturbing image in the local collective consciousness that some drooling madman had watched the farm for days from the surrounding woods while
planning his homicidal attack.
The most promising line of enquiry involved Karl
Gabriel, Viktoria’s husband, who had supposedly died in the trenches in 1914,
though his body was never actually accounted for. It seemed vaguely possible that
Karl had survived the battle, maybe disfigured, and had finally returned home
deranged. But many veterans who’d known Karl personally convinced detectives
that they had seen him die.
The case remains unsolved despite everyone’s best
efforts. As recently as 2007, the Police Academy in Furstenfeldbruck re-examined
the facts using the most modern techniques, but they too were flummoxed by the
lack of evidence and motive in one of Germany’s most enduring and macabre
mysteries.
8. THE
BIZARRE FATE OF ELISA LAM
In the age of the
internet and viral rumour-mongering, any human tragedy can be turned overnight
into an international horror story if it is even remotely quirky, and
tastelessness never enters into it. Thus, people with deformities have been blamed on alien insemination, and curious behaviour by the mentally
ill is deemed demonic possession.
But this isn’t to say that there isn’t some
genuine unexplained weirdness out there, and if a death is involved, it becomes vital to work out the truth.
One such, the drowning on top of a Los
Angeles hotel in 2013 of Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Canadian student, became a sensation. Primarily this was because CCTV footage taken in the
hotel lift during Elisa’s final hours depicts some very unusual behaviour, but
also because four months later the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office issued
findings in which there was clear uncertainty about whether or not her death was
accidental.
Even without the lift footage, the circumstances in which Elisa Lam departed this world are curious. In short, her nude body was found in the drinking-water tank on the
roof of the Cecil Hotel in downtown
LA, where it had been decaying for several days. The water tank was so
constructed – it was raised on concrete blocks, had no fixed ladder for access
and was heavily lidded – that it was near enough impossible to fall into it by
accident. But simply to get up there Elisa must have negotiated several locked
doors and passageways to which only staff had access. Suicide was considered
a possibility, though Elisa’s family insisted she’d never shown suicidal
tendencies before, while detailed examination of the body found no obvious sign of
violence or sexual assault, though the latter wasn’t definitively ruled out.
In all ways, it was a bewildering mystery.
Elisa’s behaviour in the lift, which
involved apparent conversations with somebody no-one else could see, strange
hand signals and an apparent attempt to hide, might be explainable by her
bipolar condition and the heavy medication she was on, but it is undeniably
eerie to watch online. It didn’t help, of course, that the manner of her demise
bore similarities to the haunting Japanese horror movie, Dark Water (2002), while the actual location, the Cecil Hotel, was itself a disturbing
element.
A focal point in a rundown district of town, the Cecil had a dark history all of its own. Elizabeth Short, the ‘Black Dahlia’,
called there just before her own murder in 1947, there was another rape and
murder inside the hotel in 1964, while two notorious serial killers, Jack
Unterweger and Richard Ramirez, both lived there for a time.
In retrospect it
seems highly unlikely that Elisa Lam was a victim of foul play, but as long as
so many perplexing questions remain, it will figure highly in criminology's list of distressing
curiosities.
9. CRAZY GRAFFITI, OR SOMETHING MORE SINISTER?
In normal circumstances, if one followed a trail of unexplained deaths over a period of ten years in a specific area, and more often than not found the same piece of weird graffiti close to each scene, one would soon come to suspect criminality. However, where the so-called 'Smiley Face Murders' are concerned there is much dispute.
The case was first made that an unknown serial killer of men was at large in the northern American states in 2008 by retired New York police detectives, Kevin Gannon and Tony Duarte. They'd been looking into the deaths of 45 young white males, for the most part college students, who since the late 1990s had been found drowned in different bodies of water: canals, brooks, lakes, reservoirs and the like, across 11 different states.
The previous assumption was that the deceased had died by misadventure while stumbling back to their dorms after a heavy night partying. But Gannon and Duarte's research indicated that in at least 12 of these cases, an unusual piece of graffiti, a crudely drawn smiling face, was found either close to the scene where the body was discovered, or close to the point where it had entered the water. They made the argument that for healthy young men, many of them sporty types, death by accidental drowning ought to be quite unusual, even if a lot of them were drunk at the time. They also noted that the vast majority of the victims were white; far fewer black males were found to have drowned by accident in the same time and place. To Gannon and Duarte, this indicated that an agenda was in play.
However, law enforcement tended to dismiss the thesis. They pointed to the fact that none of those drowning victims save two showed any signs of physical trauma (Patrick McNeil was fished from New York's East River in 1997, and Chris Jenkins from the Mississippi in 2002 - both were deemed to have died elsewhere, and were established as unconnected homicides). As for the unlikeliness of so many accidents occurring, the skeptics claimed that many of those named were not just drunk at the time, but inebriated - in other words, much more vulnerable to accident than they would normally be.
Doubtful profilers have also had their say, pointing out a complete lack of identifiable motive. In no case was there any sign of robbery or sexual assault. They reckoned that it was difficult to conceive of a killer, much less a group of killers, who would genuinely find satisfaction in repeatedly drowning strangers who were barely aware of what was happening to them.
Of course, the 'smiley face' imagery was harder to dismiss. There was no trace of it at over 50% of the death scenes, but it was present at many others, and that would seem like quite a coincidence. Skeptics rebutted this by arguing that smiling faces are a common signature of graffiti artists, that they appear in bus shelters and on subway walls throughout America, and that using this tenuous evidence as a hook on which to hang a massive murder enquiry would at best be a poor reason to waste an awful lot of tax-payers' money and at worst a sorry excuse for needlessly and sensationally ripping open the lives of bereaved families all over again.
While that may not in itself be a convincing argument, there hasn't been enough evidence to warrant a full enquiry. To date, the Smiley Face Murders remain a myth. However, as an addendum to this curious tale, there was a not unrelated meeting at the start of 2015 in Manchester, northern England, between senior detectives and Professor of Psychology, Craig Jackson.
Jackson was very concerned that 61 drowning deaths of young men had occurred in Manchester in the last six years, particularly in the vicinity of Canal Street, where the city's gay nightlife is centred. Jackson openly stated that he was fearful a serial killer was at work, whose method, whether or not it involved sex with the victims, culminated in him pushing or throwing them into one of the city centre's many dark, industrial-age waterways.
Whether this could actually be a foolproof method by which to kill someone is debatable, but for the time being Greater Manchester Police are not taking the theory too seriously. However, a total of 61 deaths of young men is a statistic that won't easily fade away, while over in North America, the memory of those primitive grinning faces won't be erased half as easily as the graffiti itself was.
10. THE RIPPER'S OTHER VICTIMS
Conventional wisdom holds that Jack the Ripper, the depraved serial killer who terrorised London's East End in 1888, only murdered and mutilated five women, but this is a 'fact' that would not have been recognised by police detectives at the time.
Only recently, after decades of careful analysis, have crime historians - now equipped with such modern techniques as behavioural science, forensic psychology and geographic profiling - firmly concluded that there were only five Ripper victims - the 'Canonical Five', as they have become known. Some argue there were even less than that. But at the time, the enquiry into the Whitechapel Murders was very wide-ranging, and at one stage at least 11 butchered victims were held to be the Ripper's work. Quite possibly there were even more than that.
In 1888, the London police had never before encountered a relentless and theatrical repeat-killer of this nature. The horrific mutilations, the apparent ritualistic elements, the cryptic letters to the press, the total chaos it caused in the East End's crammed, filthy streets made this an overwhelming investigation. And bear in mind that at this stage forensic science wasn't even in its infancy. The world's police forces wouldn't acquire fingerprint technology for another 14 years.
In light of this, the fact that a large number of homicides were initially clumped together under the umbrella of the same investigation should not surprise us. But were those Victorian detectives so far from the mark? Contrary to popular belief, serial killers do not always use the same
modus operandi. The craft of murder - and that is how many of them view it - grows in the practice; it is refined, improved upon; it changes. And it is also dependent on opportunity and the convenience of the moment. Take Long Liz Stride for instance. Of the Canonical Five, she was the least mutilated; she simply had her throat cut. The general opinion there is that the murderer was interrupted and had to slink away before he could damage her further.
That said, the many other unfortunates initially considered to be the madman's victims display so wide a range of physical destruction that it is difficult to identify any kind of psychological pattern, certainly not if you examine them in chronological order. Anyway, judge for yourselves.
The first genuinely possible Ripper killing occurred in April 1888 in Whitechapel, when prostitute Emma Smith suffered a sexual assault so vicious that she died from her wounds the following morning. Then, in August, another local prostitute, Martha Tabram, was attacked and stabbed to death, her body punctured 39 times. The five generally accepted Ripper murders - those of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Long Liz, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly - all follow from this point. But in addition to these there were the deaths of Rose Mylett - a Whitechapel drunk, who was strangled the following December, Alice McKenzie, whose throat was slashed in July 1889, a nameless victim in Pinchin Street in September 1889, who was so dismembered by her assailant that she'd ever afterwards be known as the 'Pinchin Street Torso', and Frances Coles, whose throat was cut in February 1891.
Here, most investigators draw their limit. Even the most ardent advocates of the Canonical Five tend to acknowledge the possibility that Jack the Ripper might conceivably have killed as many as these 11. However, as stated earlier, there were other violent and sexual deaths in the same time and place which also bear examination.
A mysterious Whitechapel prostitute called Fairy Fay was allegedly impaled with an iron spike during the Christmas of 1887, though no records confirm these details. During the spring of 1888, two other local prostitutes, Annie Millwood and Ada Wilson, reported vicious knife-attacks, which they only just survived. In November that year, a third, Annie Farmer, also claimed to have survived the Ripper. Her throat had been cut, but it was only superficial. Additionally, the Ripper has been linked to the 'Thames Torso Case', wherein a headless woman, never to be identified, was found in a cellar in October 1888, and the dismembered body-parts of known prostitute Liz Jackson were fished out of the Thames in June 1889, though these gruesome discoveries were made in Whitehall and Battersea respectively, and were nowhere near Whitechapel.
More outlandishly, the murder and evisceration of a small boy in Bradford in December 1888 was speculatively linked to the case, while the murder of a New York street-woman in April 1891 bore striking similarities.
Ultimately, these additional murders can be no more now than a talking-point. We will never know whether or not they were handiwork of Jack the Ripper. Yet the irony is that perhaps we should hope they were. If there is anything worse than the idea that a crazed sex killer was on the loose in London in that long ago, candle-lit age, never to be apprehended, it is surely the thought that SEVERAL such killers were on the loose, and that they too would go on to evade capture.
Images used. From top to bottom, they are: A face of evil, from the movie, The Exorcist (1973); the advertising poster for the documentary movie, Cropsey (2009); the poster for the movie, The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976); an original press photo of the Wych Elm tree in which Bella's body was found; a more recent press shot of the vandalised obelisk; a spooky still from the movie, The Strangers (2008); a police sketch artist's impression of the Keddie Cabin murder suspects; Amy Bradley; Natalee Holloway; Aleister Crowley; part of the carnage at Hinterkaifeck; the DVD cover for the movie Dark Water (2002); a CCTV still of Elisa Lam apparently hiding in the hotel elevator; original 'smiley face' graffiti; one of Manchester's many freight canals (thanks to BriYYZ); a traditional image of Jack the Ripper (thanks to Metro); and the Nemesis of Neglect, a satirical cartoon featuring Jack the Ripper as it appeared in Punch Magazine in 1888.
Dark tales, sinister tales, thrillers, chillers, horrors, crime and suspense - whatever you want to call them, multimillion book-selling heavyright PETER JAMES excells at them. But you won't need to analyse his sales figures to know this.
Fans of Peter James will know that he's long had a foot in both camps, though his worldwide fame 
