Vampires Through the Ages

by Brian Righi

  A year later and back on the streets of Hannover, Haarmann met a young runaway named Hans Grans, who was working as a male prostitute. The two became lovers and moved into Haarmann’s old apartment together, where Haarmann hatched the deadly scheme of luring runaways back to their quarters to be stripped of their belongings and murdered. He put the plan into action by prowling the railway stations at night looking for destitute boys sleeping on the platforms. After finding one he was attracted to, he would awaken him with a forceful nudge of his boot, and under the guise of being a station manager or rail detective demand to see his ticket.

  If the boy was unable to produce a ticket (which was usually the case), Haarmann feigned sympathy for his plight and invited the boy back to his apartment, where Haarmann filled him with food, wine, and the promise of a warm bed. Once the boy’s head was swimming with too much alcohol, Haarmann sprang his trap, and with a sudden leap he would grab the boy from behind, tearing open the boy’s throat with his teeth, then raping him and drinking his blood.

  Haarmann would later clean up the evidence, pawn the victim’s belongings, and butcher the body to be sold as salted pork on the black market, in what can only be compared in gruesomeness to something from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. What portions proved not to be disposable Haarmann weighed down with rocks and dumped into the nearby Leine River, which in June of 1924 led to his undoing after a bag of human remains washed ashore. After dragging the river for days, the police discovered nearly five hundred human bones belonging to what they believed were twenty-two separate victims.

  Given Haarmann’s history as a sexual predator in the community and his questionable involvement in the disappearance of Friedel Rothe, he became number one on their list of suspects and was placed under constant surveillance. Authorities would not have to wait long, though. True to his nature, he was soon arrested for trying to lure yet another teenaged boy back to his apartment. In a search of his residence, police were horrified to find its walls splattered with blood and items belonging to his victims neatly kept as souvenirs.

  Under interrogation, Haarmann estimated he had murdered as many as fifty to seventy young boys (he would be convicted of murdering twenty-four), referring to them in his shocking confession as “game,” and went on to implicate his accomplice Hans Grans in the crimes as well. The trial that followed became a sensation across Germany, and on December 19, 1924, Fritz Haarmann was convicted of twenty-four separate counts of murder and sentenced to death. While he oddly pleaded to be decapitated with a long sword in the town market, his life was instead ended four months later under a guillotine’s blade behind the walls of Hannover prison. His brain was removed and shipped to the Göttingen Medical Hospital for study, where it rests to this day in a jar of formaldehyde. Initially Hans Grans was also sentenced to death, but after a second trial his penalty was reduced to twelve years, and he died in Hannover in 1975.

  Béla Kiss

  While Fritz Haarmann was still alive and stalking the cobblestone streets of Hannover, another monster was plying his bloody trade in a land not far to the east. For all intents and purposes, Béla Kiss appeared on the surface to be nothing more than a simple tinsmith. Although few facts are known about his early life, we do know that he was born in 1877, and in 1900 he moved into a rented cottage in Cinkota, just outside of Budapest, Hungary, where he set up shop as a tradesman.

  Well liked by everyone in the town, Béla Kiss was a self-taught man who spent large amounts of time reading anything he could get his hands on. He also had quite the reputation as a ladies’ man, and a number of attractive women were seen in his company from time to time. While the envy of most men, married or not, it was equally noticeable that his female companions didn’t seem to last long, and before anyone knew it, they were gone.

  In 1914 war broke out, and at the age of thirty-seven Béla Kiss joined the Hungarian army and marched off to the battlefields of Europe along with most of the other men from the town. As the news from the front remained grim, many in town guessed that he, like countless others, must have ended up either dead in a muddy trench somewhere or a prisoner of war. His landlord, reasoning he would surely never return, remembered that Béla Kiss had kept a number of large drums behind his house that he claimed were for storing petrol.

  Hoping to profit from the abandoned cache, the landlord punctured one of the drums, but instead of the smell of gasoline he was greeted with the overpowering odor of rotting flesh. Fearing the worst he called in the local police, who led by Detective Chief Charles Nagy removed the drum’s lid and found the naked body of a young woman preserved in wood alcohol. Six more drums were opened, and in each the same gruesome sight awaited. Later autopsies revealed that each of the women had been strangled to death with a rope, but lending an even more macabre element to the case was that they all had two small puncture marks on their necks and were completely drained of blood.

  With this discovery Detective Nagy and his men combed the rest of the house and property, finding an additional seventeen bodies, all of which bore the same causes of death and evidence of exsanguination. Some were buried about the yard while others were simply stacked like cord wood in a nearby tool shed. In one part of the house, officials even found a secret room containing countless letters between Béla Kiss and numerous women. By the looks of it, Detective Nagy surmised, the silver-tongued Kiss had been enticing women to his home for years with promises of marriage and then murdering them.

  Catching such a clever killer proved harder than police could ever have imagined, however, since Béla Kiss was presumed killed or captured on the front. Nagy alerted the military nonetheless and ordered the arrest of Kiss, but on October 4, 1916, he received a letter from the commandant of a Serbian hospital with the news that his fugitive had died of typhoid. Initially it seemed that the “Monster of Cinkota” had escaped justice, but soon after the first letter a second correspondence arrived from the hospital stating that a mistake had been made and that he was alive after all and recuperating. With the news in hand, military officials rushed to the infirmary ward only to find that the body in his bed was not that of Béla Kiss, but rather a soldier who had died shortly before. It appeared that Kiss was tipped off somehow and substituted a dead body for his own before disappearing.

  For years the Hungarian police continued to receive sightings of Béla Kiss from around Europe and even from as far away as America. Some claimed that he had been jailed in Romania for theft, others that he died of yellow fever in Turkey. In the 1920s he was said to be a soldier in the French Foreign Legion, and in 1932 he was even reportedly spotted in Times Square, New York, working as a janitor. In each of these cases the reports were either untrue or the suspect vanished prior to questioning, and the trail went cold. Who exactly Béla Kiss was, where he went, and why he drained his victims of their blood in such a peculiar manner are answers that are forever lost to us.

  Richard Chase

  If one were to assume that such vile acts were only committed by people who lived long ago, one would be dangerously wrong. A more modern case is that of Richard Trenton Chase, the “Vampire of Sacramento,” who in late 1977 and early 1978 murdered six innocent people and drank their blood. While Chase’s life started off as normally as any other, he began showing signs of mental illness in early adolescence, including a bizarre hypochondria concerned with the functioning of his internal organs. By adulthood he was abusing drugs and alcohol frequently and had developed a curious obsession for consuming blood, based on the delusion that if he did not, his body would disintegrate.

  In 1975 this psychosis led to his hospitalization with blood poisoning after injecting rabbit’s blood into his veins. Following a psychiatric examination, Chase was admitted to a mental institution called the Beverly Manor. During his stay at the “Manor,” he freely shared with doctors his morbid fantasies of killing animals and drinking their blood and earned the nickname Dracula after staff
found dead birds in his room and fresh blood around his mouth. After a year of observation, counseling, and psychotropic medication, doctors were convinced he was no longer a threat and released him to his parents’ conservatorship. Back on the streets, however, his overprotective mother had a different opinion on her son’s course of treatment, and without his doctor’s knowledge she moved him into an apartment of his own and began weaning him off his medication.

  This of course proved disastrous, and before long Richard Chase was spiraling down into madness and bloodlust once again. On August 3, 1977, officers of the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation found Chase wandering nude and covered in blood. Not far away they discovered his Ford Ranchero stuck in the sand with several rifles, a pile of men’s clothing, and a liver (which was determined to belong to a cow) in the front seat. Although Chase was not arrested or charged with any crime, the incident proved a sinister prelude of the violence yet to come.

  Months later he took his first victim when he drove by the East Sacramento home of fifty-one-year-old Edward Griffin and shot him dead while he was unloading groceries from his car. Law enforcement’s lack of headway in the murder only seemed to fuel Chase’s psychosis, and over the next month he randomly killed five more people. When later asked by FBI agents how he chose his victims, Chase explained that he merely walked down the street testing whether or not people had locked their front doors. If they were locked, he recounted, he knew he was not welcome and so he moved on to the next house.

  The last of his murders occurred on January 27, 1978, when he entered the home of thirty-eight-year-old Evelyn Miroth in the middle of the day. In the rampage that followed, Evelyn Miroth; her friend Danny Meredith; Evelyn’s six-year-old son, Jason; and her twenty-two-month-old nephew were shot to death with a .22 caliber handgun. After mutilating the corpses and drinking their blood, Chase engaged in necrophilia with Evelyn’s body. Startled by a knock at the door, Chase fled the scene, but not before leaving a trail of forensic evidence that quickly led to his arrest. While he was in custody, police searched his apartment, which they reported looked more like a slaughterhouse than a domicile; blood covered everything from the furniture in the living room to the food in the refrigerator. Even more ominous was the discovery of a calendar marking the dates of his murders, with forty-one more planned in the year to come.

  On May 8, 1979, Richard Chase was found guilty of six counts of murder in the first degree and sentenced to die in the California gas chamber. But before his sentence could be carried out, he escaped justice by taking his own life. At the age of thirty, the “Vampire of Sacramento” was found dead in his cell in San Quentin from an overdose of antidepressants he had allegedly been saving for weeks.

  James Riva

  Despite the fact that the men mentioned so far in this chapter became known for their propensity to drink or drain their victims of blood, none of these killers actually considered themselves vampires in the literal sense. Yet there have been some blood drinkers who have cast themselves in the mantle of the vampire and committed unspeakable acts of savagery to pursue their need for blood.

  On April 10, 1980, twenty-two-year-old James Riva of Marshfield, Massachusetts, shot and killed his handicapped grandmother with bullets he painted gold. After trying to drink the blood from her wounds, he dosed her body in antifreeze and gasoline and set it on fire. When he later confessed his crime to police, he defended his actions by claiming self-defense. His grandmother, he maintained, was a vampire who had been secretly poisoning his food and using an ice pick while he slept to drink his blood. According to Riva’s delusion, everyone in the world was covertly a vampire but himself and if he killed and drank the blood of another, he, too, would become a vampire and all the other vampires would throw him a party.

  Fascinated with vampires from the age of thirteen, Riva began displaying signs of mental illness from an early age and was known to obsess over drawing pictures depicting acts of violence and gore. In time this urge led to his killing and drinking the blood of small animals. During his pretrial psychiatric review, he also reported that he kept an axe near his bedroom door and that he planned to kill his father with it one day.

  Although his defense attorneys brought in a host of psychiatric doctors who diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, he was nonetheless found guilty of second-degree murder and arson and sentenced to life in prison. On August 4, 2009, James Riva went before the Massachusetts state parole board after twenty-nine years of incarceration and testified that he was rehabilitated and ready for release back into society. Prison officials were not as convinced, however, and stated that he could not be trusted off of his medication. During an incident they recounted, Riva attacked a prison guard who he believed was sneaking into his cell at night and stealing his spinal fluid. Subsequently, Riva was not granted parole.

  Allan Menzies

  Although James Riva feared the thought of vampires, his crimes, according to his faulty reasoning, were actually intended to make him one of them, demonstrating that for some the lure of the vampire can be exceedingly strong, turning a mild interest into a deadly desire. Take, for example, the well-publicized case of twenty-two-year-old Allan Menzies of Fauldhouse, West Lothian, Scotland, who in December of 2002 killed his childhood friend of eighteen years and drank his blood, believing that doing so would make him an immortal vampire.

  Prior to the killing, Menzies became engrossed in the vampire film Queen of the Damned, adapted from a novel by Anne Rice. In it, the scantily clad vampire queen Akasha rises from her ancient slumber to feed not only on the blood of the living but on the blood of her fellow vampires as well. Fixated on the film and its main character, Menzies spent long periods of time locked in his room watching the movie over and over again. His father later told police that he often heard his son talking to himself while alone in his room and that on more than one occasion he began shouting as if in a heated argument with someone. During the periods when Menzies did venture out of his room, which were becoming less frequent, he was consumed with talking about roleplaying games and vampires and often spoke as if the character Akasha were a real person.

  Then, on December 11, 2002, twenty-one-year-old Thomas McKendrick disappeared after last being seen in the Menzies’ home. That same day, Allan Menzies’ father returned from work to find suspicious bloodstains throughout the house, which Allan explained occurred after he sliced his hand opening a can of dog food. Although Menzies’ father seemed satisfied with this explanation, the Scottish police were not, but with no evidence of foul play there was little that could be done. That is, until a few weeks later when what started as a missing person’s case suddenly escalated into murder after the decomposing body of McKendrick was discovered buried in a shallow grave in the forest not far from the Menzies home. The autopsy revealed that McKendrick had been brutally stabbed forty-two times in the face, neck, and shoulders, and had been beaten repeatedly with a hammer-like object.

  The police were quick to respond and immediately took Allan Menzies into custody, where they questioned him about the death of his friend McKendrick. To their surprise Menzies made no pretense at duplicity and readily admitted to murdering his friend, calmly recounting the events as they unfolded on the day in question. According to Menzies’ statement, the two men were talking in the kitchen of the Menzies home when McKendrick made a lewd comment about the actress who played Akasha in the film Queen of the Damned. Menzies, who was slicing a raw liver at the time, took a large bowie knife and attacked his friend, stabbing him and then beating him with a hammer until long after he stopped moving. When the act was finished, Menzies drank two cups’ worth of blood from the wounds of his dead friend and ate a small piece of his brain. During the killing, he claimed, his beloved vampire queen looked on, encouraging his murderous actions.

  In their search of the crime scene, police found a copy of the movie Queen of the Damned and a frayed vampire novel, B
lood and Gold by Anne Rice. In the book were scribbled numerous handwritten notes by Menzies pointing to something far more than just a simple case of jealous murder, including one that read, “The master will come for me and he has promised to make me immortal … I have chosen my fate to become a vampire, blood is much too precious to be wasted on humans … the blood is the life, I have drank the blood, and it shall be mine for I have seen horror” (Robertson 2003).

  In court Menzies pled guilty to culpable homicide on the grounds of diminished responsibility, but the crown rejected his plea and ordered him to stand trial before the high court in Edinburgh, where he was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of eighteen years. In November of 2004 he was found dead in his cell at Shotts Prison of an apparent suicide.

  Daniel and Manuela Ruda

  Noticeably, while most of those mentioned in this chapter acted alone (although Haarmann had an accomplice to hide the evidence, he nevertheless committed the murders by himself), there are rare occasions when blood drinkers commit their crimes in concert with one another. On January 31, 2002, a young husband and wife were convicted in a German court of law for the murder of a thirty-three-year-old man named Frank Hackert in the town of Witten. According to court records, the two lured the unsuspecting man to their apartment under the pretense of a party and stabbed him to death. When the deed was finished, they ritualistically carved a pentagram on his chest and drank his blood before falling asleep together in a coffin next to his body.

  Daniel Ruda and his wife, Manuela, first met through the personals in a heavy metal magazine called Metal-Hammer, where he placed an ad reading, “Black-haired vampire seeks princess of darkness who despises everything and everybody and has bidden farewell to life” (Rowlatt 2002).

  Although both were avowed Satanists, they were also participating members of the vampyre community. Manuela claimed that, at the age of fourteen, the devil first began speaking to her and reassuring her that he had chosen her for something special. A few years later she left her hometown of Witten and traveled to the Scottish Highlands, where she spent her time wandering lonely graveyards and absorbing the gloomy atmosphere. For a while she even lived in a cave on the isolated Isle of Skye. She also lived in London, where she worked in a popular gothic club. It was here that she joined her first vampyre coven and began attending “bite parties,” developing a taste for human blood.