The World's Most Bizarre Murders

by James Marrison

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CONSTANTINO MACHUCA AND THE KILLER COOKS: MEAT IS MURDER

  Wholly tamale? Snack lovers in the small town of Morelia in Mexico got a nasty surprise when they discovered that there may well have been an extra ingredient in their beloved tamale meat pasties.

  Fifty-six-year-old Carlos Constantino Machuca had been cooking and selling his tamales in the Mexican city of Morelia for over five years. The tamale has a long and illustrious history in Morelia, and Machuca with his hot-food cart was a familiar figure in the city, with a steady trade and a wide beat. He prepared the dough himself, filled the tasty pastries at home and then sold them out of two food carts at various points throughout the city, such as parks and outside the city’s main hospital as well as on the children’s ward there. They were always well received.

  But in April 2004, residents on the road where Machuca lived – Fernández Street – who were accustomed to the smell of frying meat and dough, noticed another far less pleasant smell emanating from their neighbour’s house. Not only that, but stray dogs were now crowding outside his back door in unusual numbers trying to get in and the owner’s two dogs were in a frenzy.

  The police were called in and arrived at the premises to find the house empty. But there was something cooking out on the back patio and it was clear that the chef had only just stepped out. Rather than waiting for Machuca to return, the police broke down the door. Machuca’s two dogs – loyal to their master, who had fed them all kinds of unexpected treats lately – wouldn’t let them in, so they shot them.

  Inside the living room the police found a dismembered corpse shoved beneath a table. The legs and arms had been hacked off and all that remained was the torso, the head and the spinal column. Although the smell inside was truly awful, beneath it was a second, sweeter aroma that actually made everything much worse: the smell of herbs.

  The police made their way through the hall and into the kitchen. On the table were 80 filled tamales, several kilos of corn gruel, 10kg of fresh dough and several cans of salsa. In short, all the ingredients to make another large batch of tamales – minus one. The only thing that Machuca didn’t have in his kitchen was any trace of meat. No chicken, no pork and no beef. So what was out on the patio, gently simmering in those two pans?

  It didn’t need a forensic scientist to figure it out. Machuca had carefully removed the limbs of his victim piece by piece. He had then stacked them by the side of the industrial-sized pots while the other parts slowly boiled just metres away from the fresh dough.

  But Machuca was no master criminal. While the police were busy securing the scene, he joined the other gawpers outside, until one of the neighbours recognised him and started screaming, ‘Here’s the murderer!’ After trying to escape on his bicycle, Machuca was promptly arrested, taken to a holding cell and interrogated for six straight hours; eventually, he broke down and confessed.

  Carlos Machuca had met his old friend, 61-year-old Rigoberto Zavala, on the previous Monday at 2 p.m. Machuca had a whopping hangover and his friend bought him a sherry to kill it off. They started drinking in the street until 5 p.m., when Machuca invited Zavala home. They bought a bottle of brandy on the way and carried on drinking until 8 p.m., when Zavala crashed out on the sofa.

  ‘He was driving me crazy,’ Machuca told reporters after the interrogation. ‘He always thought he was such a big shot and stronger than me, even though he was older.’ Machuca claimed that Zavala had been mocking him non-stop all day and had even given him a couple of playful slaps. Machuca hadn’t liked that one bit and besides, in his words, his friend ‘was a big chap.’

  Machuca had had plenty of practice with a blade, having worked as a butcher for several years in Mexico City. After grabbing a knife out of the kitchen, he slowly approached Zavala and then stabbed him right in the heart while he was asleep. A few hours later, Machuca’s family showed up at the door, but when they saw what their relative had done they fled.

  Aware that his family might at any moment denounce him, he panicked. How to get rid of the body? While polishing off what was left of the brandy, he figured out what to do. A quick look around his immediate surroundings and he formulated his first plan. Rats thrived in the sewer labyrinth. He’d use the pots to soften up the meat, dump it down the drain and let the dogs feast on the rest.

  At around 3 a.m., he started on the body, which he took apart on the living-room floor with the same knife he used to prepare his tamales. He even tried to feed some of the organs to the dogs, but they didn’t think too much of the menu and threw up. Machuca had already boiled three batches and dumped them down the sewer by the time he was arrested.

  The interrogators had other suspicions, though. A carved-up body beneath a table, two simmering pans on the patio, the dough and a cart waiting outside the front door to take them out. It looked pretty clear to police just where this was going. Had Machuca already taken his cart out and sold tamales filled with human flesh to the general public?

  While there have been many cases of cannibalism, cases of actually selling human flesh are rarer (see below). People do, after a while, have a tendency to notice something odd about the taste of the meat. Yet the tamale has something in its favour in this regard, for it shares, like most Mexican food, one whopping and heart-stopping dose of chilli.

  Tabloid headlines screamed ‘Tamales of Death!’ and the citizens of Morelia quickly checked their culinary memory. Had they ever bought their favourite snack from a vendor with a guilty look in his eye? Fortunately for them, the meat in the pre-prepared tamales was quickly determined to be chicken, and Machuca’s food carts were declared free of traces of human remains.

  Pieces of human flesh were discovered near the fresh dough, though, and this, combined with the herbs and the boiling water, pointed to dark intentions. Police suspect that Machuca had been on the brink of trying out a new way of disposing of the body. Thanks to that anonymous tip-off, he simply hadn’t had the time.

  Machuca was formally charged with the ‘murder calificado’ of Rigoberto Zavala on 22 April 2004, which meant that he also received a further sentence for the fact that he’d tried to cover up his crimes. Prosecutors pushed for the maximum penalty the law allows: 40 years’ imprisonment. With a confession and the overwhelming forensic evidence staked against him, he was sentenced to 30 years in jail in August 2006 and will therefore almost certainly die there.

  Before Machuca’s trial in Morelia, he was questioned in his holding cell by reporters. But while he was open about some of the details of the murder, he remained distinctly cagey about others. Did he now regret what he’d done? Yes he regretted it: it had been a stupid thing to do. He had been afraid and if he hadn’t have been so scared he would have turned himself in. But why the boiling water and the dough? Did it ever cross his mind to put the meat in the tamales? Not even for a single moment, he explained. What about the herbs, then? He didn’t know. Maybe to make the smell better. But why bother softening up the meat? He wasn’t sure about that either.

  Kneading so much dough comes closer to manual labour than cooking and it’s hard work on the arms; although he had no previous criminal record, Machuca is a pretty tough customer all the same. He is being held in the maximum-security wing in the State of Morelia and, according to a recent report in Mural, his neighbours complained that he was often aggressive and had recently attacked one of them.

  Yet Machuca still refers to his victim by his nickname, ‘Rigo’, and at times seems like a kid facing a detention rather than a murderer facing a life sentence. Recent photos show him with his hand in his lap looking stunned and bewildered – and guilty – although according to a preliminary psychological study he shows no signs of mental illness. In fact, when conversation comes round to the issue of the tamales, he becomes somewhat indignant. Looking a little bit sheepish, he declares, ‘I know there’s no such a thing as a perfect crime, but something had to be done with Rigo’s body. That’s why I cut him in pieces, to throw in the sewer. Not to
make tamales! No way, man, am I crazy enough to do that!’

  But the fact remains that, while Machuca claims he acted out of panic and fear, he was quite capable of carving up a human being and was in the midst of eliminating every single trace of his crime when discovered by the police. While Machuca remains adamant that he had no intention of filling his tamales with his friend, Rigoberto’s wife is now demanding justice. ‘My husband might have been a drunk but he was never a brawler,’ she has stated.

  Most of the dismay, however, has been directed at the harm this story will do to the reputation of a much-beloved snack. According to a report in the Associated Press, one police spokesman for the district said, ‘People are very upset because the tradition of the tamale is very important here.’

  The harm to the tamale notwithstanding, the local population can be thankful: stabbing, chopping up your friend, boiling him and feeding him to the rats is bad enough, but if the police hadn’t arrived when they did it could have been an awful lot worse. Only time will tell whether the people of Morelia will ever be able to sink their teeth into their favourite meaty treat in the same way again, though.

  A MEAL TO DIE FOR

  In Roald Dahl’s famous short story ‘Lamb to Slaughter’, a pregnant housewife learns that her husband, a policeman, is about to leave her for another woman. In a rage she bludgeons him to death with a frozen leg of lamb. Then, in order to dispose of the murder weapon, she defrosts the joint and feeds it to her husband’s policemen friends who are investigating the murder case. Thomas Harris, writer of the Hannibal Lecter novels, took this idea much further. Lecter, of course, feeds carefully selected parts of his victims to his guests during lavish dinner parties.

  Cases of real-life killers feeding their victims to other people are extremely rare. But that’s not to say that they are completely unheard of. There was Fritz Haarman, the ‘Hanover Vampire’, who confessed to having killed over 30 boys and selling parts of them in his butcher’s shop in the 1920s and more recently Russian serial killer Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev. Also known as ‘metal fang’, because of his false metal teeth, Dzhurmongaliev is said to have served up an estimated 70 prostitutes in stews to his neighbours. Dzhurmongaliev was declared insane and not responsible for his acts and was released ten years ago from an institute for the criminally insane. He is said to now reside somewhere in Uzbekistan.

  A BAD KNIGHT: HANI LECTER

  Not so long ago, a related case arose in Australia, centring on slaughterhouse worker Katherine Knight, who was frequently referred to in the local press as ‘Hani Lecter’. Despite her nickname, however, it is highly unlikely that Knight’s intention was for anyone to actually eat the remains of her victim. Instead, it seems to have been part of a very sick joke that she played on her lover’s two children.

  In 2001, Knight stabbed her lover to death after they had had sex. She then skinned him with such expertise that his skin, including that of his head, face, nose, ears, neck, torso, genital organs and legs, was removed to form one pelt. According to court transcripts of her trial, the ex-mental patient, who had spent her entire working life in slaughterhouses all over Australia, carried out the sickening desecration of the body with a very steady hand: ‘So expertly was it done that, after the post-mortem examination, the skin was able to be re-sewn on to Mr Price’s body in a way that indicated a clear and appropriate, albeit grisly, methodology… The excised parts of Mr Price were then taken to the kitchen and at some stage, after she peeled and prepared various vegetables, she cooked Mr Price’s head in a large pot with a number of vegetables she had prepared so as to produce a sickening stew. The removal was clean and left an incised type wound. To remove Mr Price’s head in such a way required skill, which was consistent with the skills acquired by the prisoner in the course of her work as a meat slicer.’

  Knight then moved the skinned and decapitated body into the lounge, where she placed it on a sofa, crossed its legs and put the left arm in such a position so that it looked as if he was holding an empty bottle of pop. When that was done, Knight hung the pelt to dry on a meat hook in the lounge and put two buttock steaks in the fridge for her husband’s two children to eat. She then left the stew to boil on the hob.

  Police were called to the scene at eleven o’clock the next morning; they found that the stew was still warm and Knight, who had crashed out on the bed after her long night’s work, was fast asleep. During the subsequent trial, it was revealed that Knight had once cut the throat of a boyfriend’s eight-week-old puppy, slashed a woman across the face with a knife and even threatened a child at knifepoint.

  COOKING UP A MURDER: EMILIA BASIL

  One professional cook did actually kill someone and then feed the remains of her victim to customers in her restaurant: Emilia Basil, in Argentina. In the early hours of 23 March 1973, Basil strangled her 65-year-old lover, Jose Petriella, to death with a nylon cord. Petriella was a tenant who lived in one of the rooms at the back of the restaurant and the two had been having an affair for almost five years.

  But, while Basil’s ardour for Petriella had recently begun to wane, Petriella’s love had only grown; he often told a completely unimpressed Basil that he was head over heels in love with her. In fact, he had recently announced his intention to tell her husband that the two had been having an affair behind his back and right under his own roof.

  The affair had provided Basil with a bit of excitement in the past as well as cash (Petriella regularly paid her for sex), but Basil had three children and did not want to lose her home, her husband or her restaurant. When Petriella started throwing stones at her windowpane at five in the morning, begging her to come downstairs and have sex with him, it proved the final straw.

  Basil put on her dressing gown and slippers and went to his room in the back of the house, but, when Petriella went to embrace her, she strangled him. Basil hid the body under the bed and then came back for it the next day, when she had the kitchen and the whole house to herself. Basil had had plenty of practice slicing meat for the Lebanese stews and meat pasties that she was famous for in the area and immediately went to work.

  She stripped the body and removed the arms and legs at the joints. She then sliced the meat off the arms and legs and cut it into small, bite-size pieces. She mixed the chunks of tender flesh with boiled eggs and spices then put the meat into Arabian-style meat pasties. Meanwhile, she salted and seasoned the larger, tougher pieces of flesh, added vegetables and stock and boiled them in a stew. Basil slowly fed the remains of the body to her customers, none of whom seemed to notice anything odd about the food they were eating.

  Some parts proved easier to get rid of than others, though. She was able to dump his shoulder blades and genitals down the drain outside her house. As for the head, she carried that by the hair to her largest saucepan in her kitchen and boiled it until the flesh and hair had all fallen off. That hideous liquid went down the drain as well. She then wrapped the fleshless head in brown paper and left it at the bottom of a cupboard while she figured out what to do with it.

  Her undoing was the torso. Unwisely, she decided to put it in a box, cover it with vegetable waste from her kitchen and put it in the front of the shop for the refuse men to take away. Because the box was so heavy, the refuse collectors (in classic Latin American fashion) shrugged their shoulders and refused to move it; before long, the neighbours noticed a terrible smell coming from the box and called the police.

  When the police arrived and brushed aside the rotting vegetables, they discovered the old man’s rotting torso. They knew that a man living on the same block had been reported missing by his brother two days before. Basil’s house was searched and police found Jose Petriella’s head at the bottom of the wardrobe (Basil still hadn’t made up her mind what to do with it). Of the stew and the pasties there was no sign. The customers had seen to that. Basil was promptly arrested and spent the next 14 years of her life in jail.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MURDEROUS REAL-LIFE WITCHES

  M
eet the real-life killer witches who make the fairy-tale hags of old look like the fairy godmother herself.

  In 1612, 13 individuals stood trial for the witchcraft-inspired murder of 17 people in and around the Forest of Pendle in Lancaster. At the trial, alleged witch Alizon Device told the magistrate that her grandmother, Demdike, had persuaded her to let a ‘familiar’ spirit suck her blood in return for great murderous powers. Alizon then went on to accuse her grandmother of murdering three other victims, and another witch of murdering a further five. Three men and seven women were hanged for the crimes.

  Historians estimate that there may have been as many as 50,000 ‘witches’ killed in Europe alone since the first witch hunt in 1427. For centuries, witches were drowned, burned at the stake, strangled, tortured, forced to commit suicide, had their tongues cut out and were even buried alive. And it’s pretty safe to say that none of them ever ‘blasted’ a crop, had the ability to shape-change into an animal or had personally met the devil himself at a crossroads.

  Even as late as 1945, however, there was a murder thought to be related to witchcraft in the UK and there have been real-life witches whose exploits make fairy-tale hags look like fairy godmothers.

  THE CHILD KILLER: ENRIQUETA MARTÍ RIPOLLÉS

  In 1910, tales began to circulate of children vanishing from the streets of Barcelona; by 1912, they had become so commonplace that the Governor of Barcelona, in the face of widespread mounting panic, had to claim publicly that they were unfounded. Yet the stories persisted. At the time, Barcelona was infected with a fast-spreading tuberculosis epidemic and it was believed, especially in the poorer areas of the city, that someone was killing children and drinking their blood, as this was rumoured to provided a cure for the disease. The most common story of the time told of a dark rider who took children from the streets of Barcelona at night, killed them, bottled up the blood and then sold it to the highest bidder. Horrified witnesses came forward and claimed to have seen him driving a sinister carriage pulled by two jet-black stallions. Another rumour told of a deranged maniac, stricken with tuberculosis, who walked the streets at night and left a trail of bloodless child corpses in his wake.