Random Completely Bizarre True Crime Stories (14 items)

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  (#1) Serial Killer Rodney Alcala Was A Contestant On 'The Dating Game' - And Won

  In 2010, police arrested Rodney Alcala, a professional photographer, and brought him to trial for an incredibly expansive list of crimes. By the time prosecutors had tallied up all of his potential victims, they discovered that Alcala had raped and possibly murdered over 100 women and children between 1978 until his capture. During the investigation, police uncovered photographs of potential victims and continued to charge Alcala as the identities of victims were confirmed - even after he was sentenced to death in his 2010 trial.

  The weirdest bit of Alcala’s crime spree, though, was his 1978 appearance as a bachelor on The Dating Game, which he won.
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  (#2) Carl Tanzler Lived With A Corpse For Over Seven Years Before He Was Discovered

  In 1931, 56-year-old Carl Tanzler was working at a hospital in Florida when he fell in love with a 22-year-old 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 reportedly showered the young woman with gifts and even purchased an expensive mausoleum when she passed. 

  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 in 1933, allegedly haunted by these ghostly requests, Tanzler carried de Hoyos back home in a wagon.

  Over the next seven-plus years, Tanzler preserved the woman. He replaced her skin with silk and wax, stuffed her body with rags to keep its shape, and used perfumes to disguise the smell. It wasn’t until 1940 - when de Hoyos’s sister, Florinda, stormed into his home with police in tow - that the truth was discovered. Tanzler wasn’t actually prosecuted because the statute of limitations on his initial crime had already lapsed.
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  (#3) Jasmine Richardson Helped Kill Her Family Under The Influence Of A 'Werewolf'

  In August of 2016, 22-year-old Jasmine Richardson was set free from a Canadian prison, 10 years after her and her ex-boyfriend's convictions. In 2006, then-12-year-old Richardson and her boyfriend, Jeremy Steinke, murdered Richardson’s family - her parents and younger brother - in cold blood. The crimes took place in the Richardson family's home in Medicine Hat, Alberta.

  In the months leading up to the murders, the pre-teen reportedly had made a quick transition from a bright and happy girl to dark and morbid. 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. 
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  (#4) Issei Sagawa Might Be The World’s Most Horrendous Case of 'Affluenza'

  In June 1981, Japanese citizen Issei Sagawa was caught in a Parisian park with two suitcases in his hands. Inside the suitcases were the remains of Renée Hartevelt. Three days before he was caught, Sagawa had shot and killed Hartevelt and then spent the intervening time eating various parts of her body. For his crime, the affluent Sagawa 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 30 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 Sagawa plays himself - have been created in the wake of his crimes. Sagawa is notoriously known as the "Celebrity Cannibal."
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  (#5) The Good Hart Murders Were Ripped From The Reels Of A Horror Movie

  The Good Hart murders unfold as many horror tropes: an idyllic family retreats to some secluded area for a few days of rest and relaxation only to encounter a psychopath. In 1986, that exact scenario played out when the Robison family took up summer residence in a cottage deep in the forest of the Blisswood Resort in Good Hart, Michigan. As the family settled in, an unknown assailant shot and killed patriarch Richard C. Robison before targeting the man's family.

  By the end of the night, Robison’s wife and his four children were also killed. A caretaker found the bodies 27 days later - after neighbors reported a strange smell from the Robinson cabin. While police suspected Robison’s business partner, Joe Scalero, of the crime, there was never enough evidence to convict him. Scalero took his own life several years later, still professing his innocence. Those involved believe the mysterious case to be solved, although investigators closed the file in 2018
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  (#6) Calvin Jones Dodged A Murder Charge Because His Victim Had Sickle-Cell Anemia

  In January 1966, Philadelphia man Calvin Jones escaped charges of murder due to a really bizarre coincidence. Jones had previously been charged with the murder of 23-year-old Sarah Tolbert, his then-girlfriend. It appeared as though he had beaten her to death with a rubber hose. When the young woman was autopsied, however, it was discovered that Jones’s assault hadn’t been what ended her life.

  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.
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  (#7) The Mary Morris Murders Were Likely The Work Of One Really Incompetent Hitman

  In October 2000, two Texas women were murdered in a similar manner within days of one another. Neither woman had any known enemies. In fact, both families reported that the women were loving, kind, and professional - one a nurse, the other a loan officer - living completely unconnected lives. They had only one thing in common: both women were named Mary Morris. Police found both Mary Henderson Morris, 48, and Mary McGinnis Morris, 39, dead in their cars. 

  An investigation into the matter turned up no evidence, and both cases remain unsolved. The prevailing theory is that Mike Morris - husband of Mary McGinnis Morris - hired a hitman to kill his wife. Unfortunately, the assailant made a mistake and targeted the wrong Mary Morris first. 
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  (#8) The 'Liquid Matthew Murder' Mystery Started As A Church Game

  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. In context, investigators found the note and accompanying riddle as particularly puzzling:

  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.

  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 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's body was recovered. Investigators later attributed his passing to gang-related activities.
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  (#9) A Con Man Used Masonic Paranoia To Strip An Aristocrat Of Her Family Fortune

  In the age of the Internet, it may be hard to believe that hucksters and confidence men can still run a good game. Con artist Thierry Tilly made more than £4.3 million off the gullibility of a French aristocrat. According to the former wealthy Christine de Védrines, Tilly convinced her - and 10 members of her family - that she was the target of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by an evil cabal 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 Védrines' 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 and imprisonment, and Christine de Védrines and her family are completely broke.
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  (#10) The Murderous Axeman Of New Orleans Really Had A Fondness For Jazz

  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 possibly 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 near Pepitone’s widow. While no evidence ever linked Mumfre to the other Axeman murders, lots of circumstantial evidence pointed in his direction.
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  (#11) Bernie Tiede Was The Murderer People Couldn’t Help But Love

  As of 2016, former mortician Bernie Tiede is in a Texas lockup for the 1996 murder of Marjorie Nugent, a well-to-do widow whom Bernie shot to death before hiding her body in her freezer for several months. Perhaps the strangest bit of this story is that in the wake of Nugent’s disappearance, no one seemed to care. Thanks to her reputation for being somewhat of a curmudgeon, her disappearance drew no concern.

  Reportedly, Tiede was in a relationship with Nugent, who was 40 years older than him. When Tiede’s crime was eventually discovered, the small-town characters surrounding the mortician actively fought against his incarceration, calling Tiede infallibly generous - possibly because he spent a lot of Nugent's $6 million fortune on various gifts to the town. Few people could believe the sweet-natured man could possibly have committed such a crime, even after he confessed to the "sweetheart scam."

  Jack Black portrayed Tiede in the 2011 movie Bernie. Although Tiede was actually convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life, he was released in 2014 pending a second trial. In 2016, his original sentence of 99 years was reinstated.
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  (#12) Mother And Daughter Stacy Peterson And Christie Cales Both Went Missing

  In 2007, Stacy Peterson went missing from her home in Bolingbrook, Illinois. Eventually, the blame fell (rightly) on her husband, Drew Peterson. While there wasn’t quite enough evidence to convict Peterson - a former police sergeant - of Stacy’s murder, the attention the case received actually dredged up the circumstances surrounding the death of Peterson’s third wife, Kathleen Savio.

  The renewed investigation found enough evidence to finally put Peterson behind bars. He subsequently confessed to his fourth wife’s murder, as well. The kicker, though, is that nine years before Stacy’s disappearance, her mother, Christie Cales, also went missing under similarly mysterious - and still unsolved - circumstances.
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  (#13) Ariel Castro Held Three Young Women Captive In His Home For More Than 10 Years

  It wasn’t too long ago that the strange story of Ariel Castro made headlines. For more than a decade, the Cleveland bus driver held three women captive in his home. Gina DeJesus, Amanda Berry, and Michelle Knight went missing in the Cleveland area between 2002 and 2004. At the time of their abduction, the girls were 14, 16, and 21, respectively. Each was presumed dead until Berry staged a heroic escape from Castro’s home in 2013. 

  Berry managed to get out of the house on Seymour Avenue with her 6-year-old daughter, whom Castro fathered. She alerted authorities, which led to the rescue her fellow captives. A demolition crew leveled the house the same year as the women's rescue.
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  (#14) Serial Killers Fred And Rosemary West Kept Company With Another Criminal Couple

  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Gloucester, England, Fred and Rosemary West used their local pub, Prince Albert, as a means to lure young women back to their house. While Rosemary ran a successful prostitution ring, Fred imprisoned women, some of which who appeared as the Wests' lodgers at 25 Cromwell Street. Fred was later charged for the murder of a dozen women but took his own life while awaiting trial. Rosemary was convicted for the death of her daughter Heather, among others. 

  Even more shocking, the Wests' friends and owners of Prince Albert, David and Pauline Williams, were also arrested for running their own child sex ring. Investigators believe there's a connection between the criminal activities of the Wests and the Williams.

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