5 Creepshow Unsolved Crimes

5

The German Sewer Murders

What is the worst way to die? Your answer to that question should take into account not just how painful various methods of dying may be but also other types of suffering that play into your final moments, the humiliation involved, and even the desecration that your corpse may go through after you're dead. Factor in all that, and we'd have to put "bound and dropped in sewage to drown" among several experiences we'd rather avoid. 

The first time Frankfurt authorities found a body in the sewage system, in May 1982, they figured someone had murdered the teenager elsewhere and had dumped the body down a manhole to get rid of it. And maybe that's what happened. But in time, it seems the killer graduated from using sewers as just a disposal system to using as a disposal system and murder method. Some of his six victims were alive when he dropped them down there. Then the sewage drowned them, or the sewage gas suffocated them. In the unlikely event they survived both those, they then faced this:

That's a screw conveyor, and it mashed the bodies up so much (sometimes ripping off a leg, for instance) that identification became a tricky process. One victim, Markus Hildebrandt, might have been hard to identify but for a distinctive tattoo on his arm. Markus had been thrown into the sewers handcuffed. He was a sex worker, as were a few others of the victims, while two others were 14 and 11 and had been reported missing by their parents before turning up in the sewers.

The final body turned up in 1989. So much time had passed since the other ones that you might think this was unconnected, but the victim, Daniel Schaub, had been reported missing all the way back in 1983. All we found of him in 1989 were scraps of recognizable clothing and bits of bones, washed up by one of the waterways leading out of the sewage plant. Police made no progress whatever at hunting down the killer. According to criminal profilers, though, he was most likely German, due to the fact that, well, the murders occurred in Germany. 

4

The Canadian Baby Killer

If reading about dead kids didn't brighten your day, we have some bad news for you: This next story is about dead babies. Forty-three dead babies, in fact. They weren't all murdered, probably -- Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children saw babies die pretty regularly, even without a serial killer intervening -- but in March 1981, they discovered that the last nine months had produced over seven times as many dead babies as was normal. 

Police ordered autopsies, goaded by one suspicious parent, and they found a bunch of the babies had been pumped with digoxin, which is a heart medication at one-tenth that dosage, but at these levels, it's poison. Other babies has been given epinephrine instead of Vitamin E, and despite both those substances featuring the letter "E," they're hard to mix up accidentally. To this day, some people do think these deaths had to be accidents, because sleep comes easier that way, but the evidence was strong enough that police confirmed at least five were murders.

3

Dr. No

In a lot of serial killer stories, you'll hear about bodies being identified, or bodies that can't possibly be identified. With this next story, the identification of the victim might be the weirdest part of it. This victim was, for years, dubbed "Buckskin Girl," because they found her in a buckskin poncho. They found her in 1981 in Ohio, and police believe she was one of nine women murdered by the same guy over the next decade or so.

2

The Monster Of The Mangones

Uh, we've got some more dead kids for you next. A lot of dead kids -- a dozen murdered over the course of five months in 1963 and 1964 in the Colombian city of Cali. Depending on when you say the streak ended, the number rises to over 30. The bodies generally turned up in vacant lots (called mangones, hence the killer's nickname), and it does not sound like any of these kids had very pleasant final moments. One turned up with his eyes missing. Many were drained of their blood while still alive. 

City officials, sensing rising panic, released an explanation of what was going on: This was not the work of a serial killer at all. Someone had instead dug up the bodies of these children from cemeteries and was leaving them around the city, to undermine the government! The Monster of the Mangones was a troll (or a terrorist, to use the legal term). People didn't buy this explanation because they'd identified these children -- they were children who'd been reported as missing, not buried. Unless the Monster kidnapped the children, killed them, buried them, and then dug them up again, which we're pretty sure would still make him a serial killer. 

As you might imagine, a city intent on covering up the nature of this crime wasn't too good at investigating it, so the Monster of the Mangones was never found. And in the wake of the government's misinformation came other rumors that turned the Monster into an urban legend, and it's hard for us to tell which parts were based in fact. It was said, for instance, that the Monster tortured the boys with needles. In particular, he stabbed boys in the heart to make them spasm because ... okay, we won't spell out exactly why, but they said it was sexual.

1

The Man Gorilla

The first time the people of Cumminsville found one of the Man Gorilla's victims, they thought she'd been hit by a train. It was April 1904, and a railway engineer found Mary McDonald lying at the station, something having smashed her head and chopped off half of one leg. He got her to the hospital, and she managed to just say her name before dying. People figured she might have stumbled onto the tracks by mistake, maybe while drunk. Strange though that interviews of all the train drivers failed to produce any information about plowing into anyone. 

The second victim, Louise Mueller, was also believed to have been killed by a train, even though she wasn't found especially near any train tracks (the people of Cumminsville, a small town near Cincinnati, apparently greatly feared trains). The coroner looked her over though and said, no, she could not have been hit by a train and then walked several streets over to the clump of weeds where they found her, and also a train would have injured her in a bunch of ways other than smashing her skull. Victim 3, Alma Steinigewig, carried a train ticket, which might lend credence to the theory that the serial killer was a train. But the trail of blood showing how she'd been dragged, plus the giant human boot prints nearby, suggested otherwise.