Lucid Dreams and Saturn Skies The Life and Writing of Andrew Kincaid

Tag Archives: Serial Killers

Life in a Small Town Isn’t Always What It Seems. Or Is It? (It Isn’t).

July 6, 2012 4:55 pm / 3 Comments /

There are two conflicting pop culture cliches concerning life in a small town.  One is the idyllic, Norman Rockwell portrayal, where a small town is portrayed as something like a little slice of heaven on Earth.  This is the stereotypical, baseball and apple pie American ideal that most small towns aspire to with varying degrees of success.  And then on the opposite pole there is the portrayal of small towns favored by Stephen King and other horror authors since time immemorial–the Norman Rockwell-gone-wrong where on the surface everything seems fine but like a white washed tomb the pleasant exterior conceals corruption.

Having lived in a small town my entire life, I’m in a position where I can judge the truth of both these extremes.  Both are true, to a certain extent.  There are wonderful people in small towns, people who will do anything for you and who still live by the Golden Rule.  The down-home feel and old fashioned spirit are both still alive and well in America’s small towns (at least the ones I’ve been in).  Where I live, it’s safe to go out at night and a lot of people still leave their doors unlocked (I don’t, but that’s because I have anxiety problems and a lot of portable electronics).

However, that is not the whole story.  Horror is a popular genre not because it talks about terrible things that can never happen, but because it helps us to deal with the terrible things that do happen in a safe way.  The horrors of the world are not far away in a small town, no matter how friendly or safe it might be.

Certainly, there may not be as much crime and violence in rural areas as in a bigger city, but while the frequency of such events might be lower they are often more horrific simply because they happen in smaller, close knit areas, where everyone knows everyone.  I can think of several terrible things that have occurred around my area, senseless and bizarre crimes that still echo in the local memory years, even decades, later.

By way of example, in my own town two local boys in the 90′s went on a killing spree.  The story goes that they killed an old lady in the next town over by crushing her head with a brick.  They killed two more people before finally being caught in Oklahoma.  They’ve since been executed.  When asked why they did what they did, one of them responded that they were bored.  Even creepier, one of them worked at a local grocery store and he carried out for my mom a week before he and his friend went on their spree.  The woman’s body was never found.

I covered another example in a previous post.  Cletus T. Reese killed three men on his farm the next county over, spurred by voices in his head.  He did the deed by braining them with a heavy branch.  His story went on to become the subject of local folklore, which portrayed him as a cunning serial killer rather than a sad, mentally ill man haunted by inner demons who destroyed three lives as a result of his delusions.

So, by way of my own experiences, the Stephen King-esque cliche of the white washed tomb town is very much true.  But then so is the 1950′s Norman Rockwell stereotype.  It’s rather like when you see the ugly side of a person, say when the lose their temper and say something that shouldn’t be said.  Often the response will be, “So now we see who you really are!” (or the like).  Well, no.  And yes.  Really, it can be both at once and neither at the same time.  Kind of like how grey is neither black nor white but a mix of both.

That, in a nut shell, is life in a small town.

 

Posted in: Ghost Stories, Killers and Serial Killers, Life & Writing, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Legend of the Bunnyman (Based on True Events…Seriously, I Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up)

June 29, 2012 2:17 pm / Leave a Comment /
The Colchester Underpass, better known as Bunnyman Bridge

A photo of the Bunnyman Bridge during daylight. Officially known as the Colchester Overpass, two rail lines run over top of it and the road itself is also fairly busy. Keeping kids away from this place could be part of why the story of the Bunnyman came into existence.

Ask anyone under the age of twenty out in Fairfax County, Virginia if something lurks in the night under the Bunnyman Bridge, and they will tell you most assuredly that something does.  Be he a flesh and blood maniac or a being of a more ghostly variety, the Bunnyman is said to haunt the Colchester Overpass, now better known as Bunnyman Bridge.

The legend began somewhere around 1970, and the information that I have seen claims that it has spawned upwards of fifty-four variants(!).  The most common version of the story goes as follows.  Around 1904, the residents of Clifton, Virginia successfully petitioned to have the local asylum/prison shut down.  Since you can’t just release a bunch of violent crazy folks out into the countryside, the prisoners were to be transported to another facility.  All went well, at least until the transport crashed, killing several of the prisoners and allowing the rest to escape.  All but one of the escapees were rounded up.  Skinned, half eaten rabbit carcasses left hanging from trees and the Colchester Overpass began to appear soon after.  Officials then found the body of Marcus Wallster, left hanging from the Underpass in a similar manner to the rabbits.

Understandably concerned, the police ramped up their efforts to find the madman and soon discovered that the culprit was none other than Douglas A. Grifin, who had been put in the asylum for killing his family on Easter Sunday.  When the climactic confrontation came between the authorities and the madman, Grifin was hit by an oncoming train in an attempt to escape.  Ever since, around Halloween when the veil between our world and the spirit world is thin, locals claim to see rabbit carcasses hanging from the Colchester Overpass.  Some have even claimed to see a figure standing there in the shadows.  Nobody ventures beneath the Underpass to see who it is though because the Bunnyman makes no distinction between rabbits and people–many variants of the legend have our costume-clad friend going Jason Vorhees on curious teenagers who come calling on Halloween Night, leaving their mutilated corpses dangling from the Colchester Overpass like Marcus Wallster so many years before.

Of course, this is all sorts of urban legend-y fun but how much of it is true?  Is this story, like Cropsey, more of a way to scare teens and preteens away from danger?  As you might suspect, the bulk of this story is false.  There never was an insane asylum in Clifton, and county records have no men named Marcus Wallster or Douglas A. Grifin on record as ever having lived.

However, there are some elements of the story which are true.  Namely, there really was a crazy guy dressed in a bunny suit terrorizing (actually more like confusing the hell out of) people in Fairfax County.  Two separate incidents from 1970 report a man dressed in a bunny suit yelling at people he felt were trespassing on his property.  In one incident he tossed a hatchet through a car window, and the other he attempted to chop down a porch post with a long handled axe.  No suspect was ever detained, but in one related incident a man calling himself the “Axe-Man” accused a representative of the Kings Park West Subdivision of dumping trash on his property. To this day no one knows the mysterious costumed man’s identity.

Not coincidentally, after these events in 1970 the Bunnyman story took wing.  It isn’t often in researching folklore and urban legends that you find their origin, but in this case it seems that the truth really was stranger than fiction.

Sources:

Bunny Man–Wikipedia

The Clifton Bunnyman–Castle of Spirits

The Bunnyman Unmasked

Posted in: Abnormal Psychology, Ghost Stories, Killers and Serial Killers, Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Legend of Cropsey

June 22, 2012 8:56 pm / 5 Comments /
The poster for The Burning, a horror movie featuring a blade wielding maniac named Cropsey

“A legend of terror is no longer a camp fire story anymore!”– tagline for The Burning, the only movie I’ve seen featuring a crazed killer named Cropsey.

Folks in the Northeast US who attended literally any camp in the past thirty or forty years will probably be familiar with the name Cropsey.  For the rest of us, there is a fascinating documentary on the subject on Netflix called, creatively enough, Cropsey that in large part inspired this post.  Outside of the Northeast, we might know Cropsey better as Jason Vorhees.  That is slightly overstating the case, but let me give you the bare bones version of the story, since there are a dizzying array of variations.

The core of the Cropsey legend involves a man named Cropsey who was a respected member of the local community who lived near the local sleep-away camp.  Campers tried to play a prank on Cropsey’s son that goes horribly wrong.  The prank left Cropsey terribly deformed and seriously pissed, not to mention insane.  As a result, Cropsey took to the woods, axe in hand, where he lay in wait for any unwary campers who happened to wander away from the relative safety of camp.

The parallels with the Friday the 13th franchise and nearly every slasher ever made are pretty clear.  They all involve a blade-happy maniac with a hate-on for campers/coeds/teenagers who break the rules, be they cultural rules (anyone who has premarital sex dies) or the camp rules (if you wander off you get axed).  The way to survive is clear–simply don’t break the rules, and you’ll be fine.

In that way, what started as a regional legend has become a part of pop culture at large, although Cropsey only shows up as a named character in one movie that I know of.  That movie is called The Burning, which is basically a Great Value version of the original Friday the 13th.  It is about a cruel camp caretaker named, you guessed it, Cropsey who is the victim of a prank that gets out of hand, leaving him deformed and very, very angry.  He gets his revenge years later on a group of campers that, oddly enough, contains characters played by Fisher Stevens and Jason Alexander (better known as George Costanza from Seinfield).  In any case, the movie is actually pretty good despite its slow start.  I don’t normally laugh at people getting hacked to bits (it seems in bad taste) but some of the stuff that happens when the bloodbath begins is pretty goofy and I couldn’t help myself.

Now that the legend of Cropsey has entered pop culture, it is much more difficult now to pin down whether or not there ever really was a man named Cropsey and whether he committed any crimes.  The answer is…it isn’t clear.  There was a man named Jasper Cropsey who lived in New York, but so far as I can tell he never committed any axe murders.  The documentary Cropsey frames its entire narrative around the crimes of Andre Rand, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering several children in the 80′s on Staten Island.  While he certainly could not have been the man whose crimes originated the legend, given how recently he committed his crimes, he’s become part of the legend in that region of the country at least.

Like any number of urban legends, we probably will never know for certain where the legend of Cropsey originated.  These sorts of stories begin from seemingly nowhere and take on lives of their own.  Cropsey in particular has had a great deal of longevity, especially since his legend has inspired key parts of the modern slasher flick.  We might not know where Cropsey came from, but we can be certain that he’s here to stay.

Posted in: Ghost Stories, Killers and Serial Killers, Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Horror Review Two-fer–The Human Centipede I and II

June 11, 2012 8:57 am / 8 Comments /
The Human Centipede, directed by Tom Six

“Their flesh is his fantasy”

Those who have read my blog for awhile now know that I have a distaste for the torture porn sub-genre–in my experience, most of them are little more than plot-less excuses to sling a bunch of gore and body parts at a camera array.  Like the exploitation films of the seventies onward, they’re all style and no substance but with one difference; namely, they trade style for something akin to blunt force trauma.  While exploitation films could be goofy fun, the cinematic equivalent of a Twinkie, torture porn often lacks the wink and nod toward the audience and instead focuses on showing the inner workings of the human anatomy as explicitly as possible.

…in light of that last sentence I should once again define torture porn.  It’s not actual pornography, but rather it is called torture porn because it features explicit displays of violence and torture.  Think movies like Saw (which is actually quite a good film…the later ones not so much) and Hostel (never seen it).  I’ve touched on the topic before in my review of the abominable film Philosophy of a Knife.

With all of that in mind, you’ll understand why I put off seeing The Human Centipede for as long as I did.  This is one of those movies that people talk about in whispers, a movie that teenagers at sleep overs challenge each other to sit through without gagging.  That sort of thing.  Being that I tend to at least half pay attention to what goes on in the horror genre, I knew the entire premise of the movie: a German surgeon grafts three hapless tourists together end to end forming the titular Human Centipede.  Certainly a disgusting thing, considering the mechanics of their shared digestion, but I didn’t see how it was a concept that could carry an entire movie.  Plus, I’d heard that it was an abominably bad film from reviewers and a few people I knew who had seen it.

Still, the damned thing kept popping up on Netflix until my curiosity got the better of me and I finally watched it.  I knew The Human Centipede would be bad, but I couldn’t have expected it to be anywhere near as bad as it was.  There was no plot to speak of, just a bunch of stuff happening to pad out the length of the movie to an agonizing hour and a half.  When the Human Centipede was finally revealed, it really didn’t live up to the build up.  Maybe for people first seeing the movie, but not two or three years after it was made.  Plus, it didn’t help that the director couldn’t be bothered to develop his characters.  Had he done so, their plight would have been more disturbing.  Don’t get me wrong–the entire concept is disturbing.  But the movie lacks any kind of impact other than the gag factor because there is not any character development.  Rather than actual people, the victims of the mad doctor’s surgery are little more than the cinematic equivalent of cardboard cut outs.

That lack of character development led to one of the two things I found surprising about The Human Centipede.  The first was that the movie was boring.  Oh my good Lord was it boring!  Forty-five minutes in I felt like I’d been sitting there for two hours.  Both the lack of plot and the lack of any sort of characterization sucked any tension out of what could have been quite an intense movie.  Only one scene made me feel tense, and that was the crawling chase scene where the lead guy of the Human Centipede, a random Japanese guy, disabled the mad doctor and led an escape attempt.

“100% medically INaccurate”

The other bit that surprised me was the amount of restraint the director showed when it came to gore.  There was surprisingly little of it, despite the premise of the film.  That might have been a disappointment for the gore-hounds out there, but I was impressed.  But that feeling quickly dissipated when I decided to subject myself to The Human Centipede 2, where Tom Six more than made up for the lack.

You might ask me why I watched the second movie if I didn’t like the first.  I’m not sure I have an answer for that, other than that I’m a glutton for punishment.  If the first Human Centipede was terrible, the second was absolutely abysmal.  HC2 featured a bug-eyed recluse obsessed with the original The Human Centipede.  That’s right–HC2 takes place in the “real” world, where apparently someone liked The Human Centipede enough to try and reenact it.

…it only gets worse from there.  You might be asking how that’s possible, but believe me it is.  I’m not even sure what to say about HC2, other than that it is completely disgusting, stupid, and reprehensible.  The amount of gore in the movie isn’t quite cartoonish, but it is nearly so.  While HC1 tried to build tension and strike you with the horror of the scenario its characters found itself in, HC2 dropped all pretenses and became pure torture porn.  But it’s all filmed in black and white, so it’s artsy (that’s how that works, right?).  I think Tom Six attempted to top himself with HC2, and he certainly did but not how he intended.  He proved that you could make a movie even more boring, stupid, and offensive than The Human Centipede.  No mean feat, that.

Do you ever find yourself watching a movie you know is going to be awful in spite of yourself?  Have you seen either of these movies, and if so what did you think?


Posted in: Movie Reviews, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

May 21, 2012 3:46 pm / 1 Comment /

Full Dark, No Stars is an anthology consisting of four stories by Stephen KingI’ve said it before and I will say it again: some of Stephen King’s best works are his shortest.  It was with that in mind that I picked up Full Dark, No Stars sometime last year, but it sat on my bookshelf since.  Now that I basically have nothing but time on my hands–being both a graduate and unemployed–I finally got a chance to read it.  Let me tell you, it was certainly worth the wait.

Full Dark, No Stars is an anthology consisting of four novellas, each one dealing with the theme of retribution.  1922 is the first of the bunch.  It is set in Hemingford Home, Nebraska, and it follows a father and a son who commit a terrible crime motivated by greed and pride.  Their crime does not go unavenged–it is a Stephen King story after all–and things go from dark to pitch black really quick.  I’m thinking 1922 is my favorite story of the bunch, although they’re all good.

Next up in King’s collection of horrors is Big Driver, where a mystery writer gets a great deal more than she bargained for after a speaking engagement when she runs into the titular Big Driver on a lonely stretch of road.  If 1922 was brutal, Big Driver takes things to another level; I found some parts difficult to read, fair warning.

The next story, Fair Extension, was the weakest of the bunch in my mind.  A man with cancer comes across a mysterious stand near an airport, where a strange man sells “extensions”.  It’s less gory than the preceding novellas, but in its own way it is still rather gruesome.  I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say that jealousy can get the better of anyone, even the best of men.

The final story in the collection was A Good Marriage.  A house wife learns the hard way that sometimes, monsters can lurk behind even the kindest of faces.  That, and that you can never truly know the inner workings of another person, no matter how close you become to them.  I should add that this story is very much inspired by true events; King himself says as much during the epilogue.

King was very much in the Bachman state of mind when he wrote Full Dark, No Stars; that is to say, normally King’s works end on something of an up note, but not here.  The title is apt as these are four of the darkest pieces King has published under his own name.  They’re true as well, as true as fiction can get at any rate.  If you want to see the master of horror at his best, give Full Dark, No Stars a look.  You won’t regret it.


Posted in: Book Reviews, Ghost Stories, Our Weird World, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gary Ridgway – The Green River Killer

February 3, 2012 9:06 pm / 6 Comments /
Gary Ridgeway - the Green River Killer

The face of a monster.

Gary Ridgway, the man wh0 would later become known under his more infamous moniker “The Green River Killer”, was described by his friends and family as “friendly but strange”.  They never could have known that the strange man would go on to become one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.

Ridgway was born in Salt Lake City Utah on February 18, 1949 to an unhappy family that consisted of himself, his brothers Gregory and Thomas, and his parents.  His upbringing was tumultuous – it wasn’t uncommon for his parents to argue violently in front of their boys, and as if that wasn’t bad enough his mother would humiliate Gary in front of the family.  Part of his shame was the fact that he was a bed wetter (serial killers often show the so-called serial killer triad during childhood – bed wetting well beyond the age when it should have ended, animal torture, and arson).

As if all of that wasn’t enough (and maybe in part because of all of the above), Ridgeway had a low IQ.  His score was only 82 (where the average score is 100) and he suffered from poor performance in school.

When Ridgway was 16, he began his violent criminal career when he stabbed a six year old boy.  It is said that he walked away laughing, saying “I always wondered what it would be like to kill someone.”

So it was quite obvious early on that Ridgway was a troubled individual, but no one would know just how troubled until the body count was tallied.  His murderous career (oh and he regarded killing women as his career…the guy was a complete nut job, as you might guess) spanned from 1972 until 1998.  When he was arrested in 2001, evidence existed to convict him of 49 killings.  But after his arrest, he confessed to 71 murders that he recalled – he claimed he’d killed so many that he couldn’t remember the exact number of crimes he committed.  Some believe the number to be 90 or more.

From any other serial killer this might be taken as boasting, but unlike most others of his kind, Ridgway took great pains to avoid being caught.  The evidence for this is clear: while most of his killings took place around the Green River in Washington state, some remains were found around Portland, Oregon.  Ridgway later revealed that he moved the remains there to throw the police off his trail.  He also would throw trash and various other debris, sometimes scraps of papers with other people’s writing on them, onto the bodies to confuse authorities.

So, it seems very clear that Ridgway was indeed trying to avoid capture.  That might lend some credence to his claim that he couldn’t remember how many murders he had committed – after all, his care allowed him to operate for over 26 years.  That is a very long span of time, and if he killed on a regular basis it would be relatively easy to forget.  It is horrifying to think about, that a human being could be so callous that he forgets one life he took, let alone more than one.

How did Ridgeway manage to kill for so long?  The length of his criminal career is as amazing is it is horrible.  You’d think in that time he would have slipped up once in all of those years, especially given the fact he was by all accounts not a very bright fellow.  Whatever he lacked in the intelligence department, he seemed to make up for with sheer luck.  Often times, serial killers meet their downfall when they are picked up on unrelated charges.  Ridgway was picked up on unrelated charges (solicitation) in the early 80′s, but his more serious crimes went unnoticed.   He even became a suspect in the Green River killings in 1983, but he was never convicted.  In 1987, police took hair and saliva samples from him, and it was this DNA record that proved his undoing years later in 2001 when he was finally arrested.

A photo of the Green River, the Riverman's hunting grounds.

The Green River. Ridgway’s hunting ground was the region surrounding this river.

That’s right: the police had him, but they let him go.  It could have been incompetence on the part of the police, or it could simply have been that the massive deluge of evidence and suspects at the time overwhelmed the authorities and Ridgway slipped through the cracks.  It could also have been that technology at the time wasn’t good enough to catch him – after all, the techniques that allowed for modern DNA sequencing were only in their infancy.  Any number of factors could be responsible for Ridgway’s ability to elude the police and kill again.  It might have had something to do with his choice of victims, though.

Ridgway preyed on prostitutes and young runaways – all women.  He hated women.  His mother was a domineering figure who abused and belittled him, and it is thought that his hatred might stem from this treatment in his formative years.

He hated prostitutes in particular, as he believed they spread AIDS.  Which makes the fact that he had sex with said prostitutes before killing them rather odd – but then most psychopathic killers are less than rational.

In any case, his usual operation was to lure the prostitute or runaway into his vehicle, have sex with them, and then strangle them.  Sometimes he tortured them as well.  At first he strangled his victims with his bare hands, but the scratches and bruises they left on his arms made him worried that he’d be discovered, so he took to using a ligature (usually a cord or an article of clothing.)  Once the woman was dead he would dump their body in a heavily forested area.  Usually he left the corpses nude, oftentimes in clusters, and sometimes he would pose the bodies.

When Ridgway was finally caught, prosecutors used the death sentence as a bargaining chip to uncover the missing victims of his sick “career”.  He could live, albeit behind bars, if he told everything he knew.  So Ridgway confessed to 71 killings, every one that he could remember.  Some have been critical of the decision to take the death sentence off the table but if it had not been done, likely only seven of the murders (the seven Ridgway was linked to by genetic evidence) would have been solved.  The death penalty was taken off the table to find justice for the rest of his victims, and to provide some sort of assurance to their families that justice was done.

The Green River Killer will rot behind bars for the rest of his natural life, where he can do no more harm.  But no amount of vengeance in the world can erase the scars left both in the region and in the national psyche by Ridgway’s reign of terror.


Posted in: Killers and Serial Killers, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

January 30, 2012 7:52 pm / Leave a Comment /
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a low budget film shot in the late eighties that follows a killing spree perpetrated by a low-functioning killer named Henry. The movie is infamous for its shocking depictions of brutal violence.

Based on the true life serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas.

The serial killer is a common horror movie trope.  From Hannibal Lecter to Leatherface, audiences seem to be fascinated by the sociopathic killer.  And why wouldn’t they be?  They are at once something familiar and something far beyond our normal experience.  They aren’t some supernatural beast nor some undead monster; rather, they are humans the same as you and I.  But at the same time, they lack the very qualities that make a person human – empathy, impulse control, and respect for human life.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer follows one such killer.  But he differs in many ways from the typical movie serial killer.  He is neither the suave intellectual like Lecter nor a psychotic freak like Leatherface.  Henry acts closer to how a true sociopath would act.  He’s low functioning -he can’t read and the only work he can hold down is as a part time exterminator.  He shows little or no emotion – when Becky, his roommates sister, tells Henry she loves him, his response is flat and emotionless.  He has no empathy and no impulse control – he can kill without compunction or remorse, and he does so more than once during the course of the movie.

All that being said, you’re right to assume that this is a very violent movie.  It isn’t flashy and it isn’t stylized – the violence is brutal and spontaneous.  And worse, the killers (Henry works with his roommate, Otis, through most of the movie) take joy in their depravity.  In once scene, Otis is upset because a teen he sold drugs to punched him in the nose after he grabbed the kid’s thigh (sounds like a great guy doesn’t he?).  Otis wants to kill the boy, but Henry convinces him that would be a bad idea since people had seen them together.  So, they drive out to a tunnel, flag down a passing car, and kill the occupant, for no reason other than Otis was upset and they thought it would be fun.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is considered by many to be one of the most shocking movies ever made.  And it was indeed shocking and disturbing.  What got to me most was the casual disregard for human life.  No remorse.  No empathy.  Henry wanted to kill, so he killed whoever and wherever he wanted.

I thought this was an interesting movie for its portrayal of serial killers in a  more realistic light.  However, I don’t think it is a particularly great movie.  I wasn’t sure what it was about it that I didn’t care for.  Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was okay, but it’s probably not one I’ll sit down to watch again.


Posted in: Killers and Serial Killers, Movie Reviews, Our Weird World, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , ,

The Story of Murder Ridge – the Life and Crimes of Cletus T. Reese

January 6, 2012 3:50 pm / 1 Comment /
Cletus T. Reese was a mentally disturbed man who murdered 3 men in the 1950's. The farm he lived on is now known by the name "Murder Ridge". Legends depict Cletus Reese as a clever serial killer, when in truth he was a deeply disturbed individual.

Cletus T. Reese, the man behind the legend.

Murder Ridge.  Sounds like a pretty frightening place doesn’t it?  The story behind the name goes that in the 1950′s, Cletus T. Reese tooled around the highways and byways in and around Coshocton county, Ohio looking for stranded motorists.  He would offer to help those he found, but instead of fixing their car trouble he would bash their skulls in and scrap their cars for money.  As for the infamous ridge itself, the story goes that Murder Ridge is haunted by Reese’s’ victims, as many as fifteen of them, and the big man himself.

Those are the stories, at any rate.  The real events behind the story of Murder Ridge played out quite a bit differently than local legend suggests.  Don’t get me wrong though, “Murder Ridge” is a real place.  It’s a rural stretch of highway in Coshocton county that runs in front of what was then the Reese farm.  Cletus Reese was a real guy too, although he wasn’t the coldly calculating serial murderer of legend.

Cletus T. Reese was a bear of a man, easily tipping the scales at 250 pounds, with a history of psychological problems.  He did a stint in a mental hospital in Cambridge, where he was treated for schizophrenia.  He was released a year later.  It became pretty obvious later that the treatment hadn’t helped, especially after Clyde Patton disappeared.

Mr. Patton was a high school teacher and part time car salesman, who disappeared while taking a customer on a test drive.  The customer was quickly identified as Cletus Reese.  However, it wasn’t until Reese’s’ sister became suspicious of his having arrived home with a new car and called the police that Reese was arrested.  It didn’t take long before the police turned up Mr. Patton’s body – his head had been crushed with an oak branch and he was found buried in a shallow grave.  Reese fessed up to killing Mr. Patton, but he claimed it was an accident, that he and the part time car salesman had gotten into a fight that had gone too far.

Police searched the farm and turned up two more bodies, belonging to Lester Mellick and Paul Tish. Tish was an escapee from the very same hospital where Reese was treated.  Mellick was from Danville, but there doesn’t seem to be any more details about him.  Both men had their heads bashed in.

Reese changed his story and confessed to the murders.  But his story changed with each telling – once he told police”this has been going on a long time”, and another time he said told investigators that the three bodies that they found were his only victims.  He retracted his statement at one point, after which he came back and gave an incoherent story to police.  Reese said “Mrs. Truman” told him to kill the men, and he claimed he shot all three with a .22 caliber pistol.  Reese claimed he killed Tish over a difference of theology.

It was pretty clear by that point that Cletus T. Reese was out of his mind.  Reese was labeled a paranoid schizophrenic with homicidal tendencies and he was remanded to the custody of Lima State Hospital.  He lived there in the maximum-security ward until he died of a heart attack at age 48.

Sometimes truth is more disturbing than legend.  Other times, legends take a mundane truth and inflate it so much the truth can no longer be seen..  I think Reese’s’ story lies somewhere between the two extremes.

It should be noted that the murders were discovered during a contentious gubernatorial campaign, where the Republican candidate used the incident to bash his opponent for not being willing to put more money into the state mental health system.  The media jumped into the frenzy (“It bleeds it leads”), dubbing the farm “Murder Ridge” before the bodies even went cold.  I think the facts of the case became obscured by the political theater and the media frenzy, and the true story became little more than a historical footnote.  I, for one, knew nothing about it until a friend mentioned that they had visited Murder Ridge on a ghost hunt, and I’ve lived in the area my entire life!

I don’t mean to denigrate the grisly nature of Reese’s crimes – three men had their lives cut tragically short.  But, it is fascinating to me how the story has evolved in the fifty or sixty odd years since the events that inspired it.  Reese was, in reality, a very sick man who probably would not have killed had he gotten the help he needed.  But, in the popular consciousness, he became the cold, calculating killer of local folklore

Then again, there may be more to the true story than what I’ve set forth here.  There is some speculation among those familiar with the case that Cletus T. Reese might have killed more people.  There is only one man who can answer that with any certainty – Reese himself.  I doubt he’ll be talking anytime soon though.


Posted in: Abnormal Psychology, Killers and Serial Killers, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Law and Order: SVU

December 26, 2011 3:08 pm / Leave a Comment /
Law and Order: SVU is an NBC show in the Law and Order family. It follows detectives of New York City's sex crimes division.

Dunh-dunh!

Not too long after my brother and I moved out on our own (well, kind of), I decided to sign up for Netflix.  Before that I watched Hulu, but I found the free version to be lacking a lot of good programming – although if you dug around you could find a few gems, the quality of the shows on there was generally hit or miss.  So I signed up for Netflix, and I found that it is ADDICTIVE.  This addiction has fueled a lot of my movie reviews on this blog.  I’ve not been watching much in the way of horror or fantasy movies lately, or any movies really.  So I thought it might be fun to start doing reviews of television shows in addition to my movie and book reviews.

I often find myself going on binges where I watch one show and one show only until I either finish the series or force myself to slow down.  I did that with Hoarders, Hey Arnold!, Friday Night Lights, and Jericho.  I’m finding myself doing the same with Law and Order: SVU.

But then can you blame me?  SVU is a great show!  It follows the Manhattan Special Victims Unit, a department of the New York Police Department dedicated specifically to sex-related offenses.  Each episode is a stand-a-lone case, although they do often mention things that happened in previous episodes.  Sometimes the plot lines are the famous Law and Order “ripped from the headlines” episodes, where the case in question is a thinly veiled retelling of actual crimes.  The most recent (for me anyway – I’m in season 6) of these style episodes involved a killer nicknamed “RDK”, who rape, dismembered, and killed his victims.  He’d also leave little clues and riddles for the police to solve, which usually pointed to his next victim.  He was a thinly veiled rip-off of the BTK Killer, although of course the particulars were different.

Oftentimes the plot of a given episode will revolve around a political/societal issue.  These episodes are usually interesting in that they often reflect what was going on at the time – it’s a neat peek into American society at the time (I’m aware the show is still on but, remember, I’m watching old episodes.  The show started in 1999 – things have changed a lot since then, obviously :P).  It is during these episodes that the one glaring flaw in the show seems to rear its head though.  The detectives will often erupt into soundbites when discussing said cases – one taking one side, the other diametrically opposed.  There is just something about it that bothers me – the usually taut writing behind the show seems to weaken at these points, and it can feel like you’re hearing pundits rather than the characters.  Although to be fair, the viewpoints each character espouses is consistent with how they’ve been developed up to that point.

Speaking of characters, this show wouldn’t be as awesome as it is without the colorful and interesting cast of characters.  The two primary detectives the show follows are Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson.  Both are very driven, although for different reasons, and both will do just about anything to solve a case.  Often, they’ll go too far and their actions wind up blowing up in their faces.  And that is what makes the show awesome – it’s real.  They don’t always get the bad guy, and even if they do there have been times he has gotten away on a legal technicality.  Even if they do get the bad guy, oftentimes it turns out that nobody really wins.

The characters are well done, the stories are well written, and overall the show is well acted.  If you like cop shows and you haven’t seen SVU yet, you definitely should!  I’ll probably wind up watching another episode tonight myself, actually :).


Posted in: TV Show Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Elizabeth Bathory–Queen of Serial Killers

December 3, 2011 12:18 pm / 7 Comments /
A portrait of Elizabeth Bathory

Beautiful. Royal. Deadly.

Serial killers are the monsters of the modern world. They haunt the cities and countryside of America, preying upon the most vulnerable among us to fulfill their sick and twisted needs. Most often, serial killers are men who kill to derive pleasure of some sort be it sexual, psychological, or both. They are men with names like John Wayne Gacy (“The Clown Killer”), Albert Fish (“The Werewolf of Wysteria”), Dennis Rader (“The BTK Killer), and Gary Ridgeway (“The Green River Killer”).

Many believe the man who began this trend, the first serial killer in history, was Jack the Ripper, that mysterious madman who terrorized Whitechapel in 1888.  However, as often turns out to be the case, popular opinion is wrong on this count.  The first recorded serial killer in history (although I’m certain there have been serial killers as long as there have been people) lived about three hundred years before Jack the Ripper stalked his first victim that chilly London night.  Her name was Elizabeth Bathory, and she stands as the queen of serial killers with a body count that is said to dwarf that of even the most vicious modern madman.

Elizabeth was born August of 1560 to a powerful branch of the royal family in Hungary. She was brought up in the rarefied atmosphere of 16th century elites – her every whim was satisfied, and people from all walks of life (some forced) fawned over the beautiful aristocrat.  And she was a beauty by the standards of the day, with her porcelain white skin and hair the color of raven’s feathers. In addition to beauty, she had brains too – she could speak four languages, ran her husband’s estate while he was off fighting the Ottoman Empire (a pretty much constant gig), and even defended said estates when the Ottomans invaded Hungary and struck out toward Vienna.

Beauty and brains could not compensate for the ugliness that lay deep inside her, though.  Elizabeth was a narcissist who changed her clothes six times a day and was known to spend hours admiring her own beauty in the mirror.  She was impulsive and had a violent temper, and was known to lash out at her servants in a fit of rage, beating them senseless for the most minor of offenses.  She was not the good, faithful wife her husband (who was a brutal, unsavory fellow himself) would have liked and expected her to be – she was rumored to participate in sadomasochistic orgies, often forcing her victims to participate on the threat of severe beatings and other torture.  Beside that, she took many lovers both male and female.

Oh and did I mention that black magic? She participated in satanic rituals and other dark rites, which often involved the torture or death of her hapless servant girls.

Like any serial killer, Elizabeth Bathory had a modus operandi, or a distinct way of going about her crimes.  Often in this sort of case the MO involves some kind of ritual, and victims with similar attributes are targeted each time.  Most of the time the victims are vulnerable people who won’t be missed by the larger society – the homeless, runaways, and people in poverty stricken areas.

Bathory acted in a similar manner, but with one fundamental difference – in her world, she ruled.  Her primary home was Cseltje Castle, which lay in the Little Carpathians.  It was a fairly isolated area, and she had complete control over the lives of the peasants living in the seventeen villages on her estates. There literally was no risk of punishment – in that time, the nobles could basically do as they pleased and mistreatment of their social inferiors was commonplace and even accepted. However, the horrors to come would be appalling even for their day.

Cachtice Castle was one of the castles owned by Elizabeth Bathory

Cachtice Castle, one of the castles Elizabeth Bathory owned during her lifetime. She spent her last days here, walled away in her room.

The killer aristocrat targeted lovely peasant girls and women, who she lured to the castle with promises of jobs and decent pay.  Sometimes though she eschewed this formality and simply had the girls abducted and brought back to her chambers of death.  When they were brought back to the castle, Bathory and four of her collaborators subjected the girls to terrible torture.  She would beat them senseless then cut them with razors.  She also enjoyed sticking them with pins and scissors, and burning with candles and hot pokers were two other favorites.

In addition to the torture and humiliation, she sexually assaulted her victims, often by forcing them to take part in the aforementioned orgies, and at least once by performing genital mutilation with a hot poker.

Many of her victims were found covered in bite marks, some having even been bitten to death.  This, coupled with the tremendous vanity that marked her personality, leads many to believe that Bathory was a vampiress.  The story goes that once a servant girl was braiding Bathory’s hair when she pulled too hard.  The enraged aristocrat walloped her unfortunate servant upside the head, so hard the girl’s nose gushed blood that spattered spots on Bathory’s face.  One of her later collaborators noted that the skin where the blood had been seemed whiter and more fair than the surrounding skin.  From this incident, so it goes, Bathory became convinced that bathing in the blood of slaughtered servant girls would keep her young forever.

It’s also widely believed that hearing this story, along with the story of that other alleged blood sucker, Vlad Dracula, inspired Bram Stoker to write his iconic vampire story.  These stories, both of them, are nothing more than stories.  There is no evidence from the earliest sources documenting the Bathory case that she bathed in or drank the blood of her victims, or that she believed doing so would make her younger.  These stories are embellishments added by later authors.

Christopher Lee in one of his most famous roles. He played Dracula in the Hammer Film Productions versions of the story.

This guy. Probably not inspired by Bathory…although it’s possible.

COULD she have done either one?  It’s possible.  She was involved in black magic rituals, so it could be possible she used the blood for ritual purposes.  It seems more likely that she had a fetish for violence and blood, and the sadistic cruelty she subjected her poor victims to fulfilled that need, rather than any need for eternal youth.  And as for Bram Stoker being inspired by her story, it’s likely he was aware of it but just because he was doesn’t mean it was the one causative idea that lead to “Dracula”.   He was well versed in the folklore of East Europe, and it seems most of the attributes of Dracula were taken from the nosferatu legends endemic to that area.   And on a side note, Dracula was only loosely based on Vlad Dracula…basically, Stoker liked the name Dracula and lifted it for his own use.

Now that I’ve cleared up some misconceptions regarding this case (I’m something of an amateur mythbuster),  let’s get back to the Blood Countess before she decides to off us shall we?  After all, she loved her some attention, and my little segue lead us away from her for a bit, something I’m sure her massive Ego couldn’t stand.  Speaking of her massive Ego, it led her to reach too far.  She committed a crime the consequences of which even her position among Hungarian royalty couldn’t protect her from.

See, killing commoners got to be a bit boring, so Bathory decided it would be entertaining to go after a bit…tougher…prey.  She decided she would open a school for the children of nobility, where they could come to her castle and learn etiquette. Once the first of her students arrived, Bathory almost immediately began to abuse them.  However, when a daughter of a lesser noble died, the jig was up.  There was a half baked attempt at a coverup, but soon the evidence mounted against the Blood Countess and her collaborators and they were outed for what they were – cold blooded killers.

The crime was horrendous, even by the standards of the day (remember, this a time when a plague could come through and wipe out half a city in a matter of weeks, when torture was an accepted part of the legal system and when nobles still had the power of life and death over their serfs).  Two of Bathory’s collaborators were brutally executed, tortured then burned alive, while another was beheaded and the fourth jailed for fifteen years.  The Blood Countess herself, being royalty,w as immune from execution.  Instead, she was walled into her apartments in her own castle, where she lived out the last four years of her life.  The legend goes that she couldn’t live without the blood of servant girls to sustain her youth.

I’m skeptical of this notion, as the whole bit about her being a vampire was tacked on later.  Then again, in her own way she WAS a vampire – her Ego fed off of the praise and the suffering of others.  Maybe being walled away, cut off from all the praise and power she’d grown accustomed to, unable to indulge her sick fantasies, was too much for her.  Maybe she just gave up living.  No matter how it happened, we do know she died in 1614.

At the end of the day, Bathory stands alone amongst the ranks of the most depraved people in history.  Her body count is the highest of all the known serial killers.  The tallies vary wildly, and there is a lot of debate over what the right number is, but she and her collaborators were indicted on 80 counts of murder.  The records from the time though put the count at upwards of 650, a number so huge as to be mind boggling. Some reject the number as too large, accepting the smaller (but still mind bogglingly huge) count of 300 victims.  One source at the time counted “only” 37, but with the caveat that those where only the ones he was aware of.

I personally think the highest count is the most accurate.  You have to take into account the facts that A) she lived in a world where she could kill with impunity, which would make her more likely to be prolific and B) she killed for the better part of 30 years. It was entirely plausible that she could have reached such an astronomical number, given those circumstances.

Elizabeth Bathory stands alone among the evil.  The sheer scale and brutality of her crimes are stunning, and stand as a dark testament to what can happen when broken people are given absolute power over others.  It also goes to show that the serial killer club isn’t just a boys club.  The impulse to violence and mayhem isn’t exclusive to the male sex (although admittedly men are more likely to use violence to achieve their goals).  Women can be killers too.  And sometimes, they’re better at it.


Posted in: Abnormal Psychology, Killers and Serial Killers, Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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