However, after a while, it seemed to her that the blood was losing its beneficial effects. Was it perhaps because the blood was from peasants? On the advice of a fellow witch, in 1609, Bathory began to invite daughters of the nobility to come to her castle and learn upper-class etiquette. They were, of course, promptly murdered.
Whether Bathory actually did bathe in and drink human blood is unconfirmed. But, when word finally reached the Hungarian king that girls of noble birth were disappearing in the area, a party was sent to investigate; they found cages in the castle full of women awaiting torture and execution. Legend has it that, at that moment, knowing that her murderous rampage was nearing an end, Bathory called on her cats for help. ‘Protect me, Erzsébet, and grant me a long life. I am in peril, O cloud!’ she is reported to have said. ‘Send me 90 cats, for thou are the supreme Lord of cats. Give them thy orders and tell them, wherever they may be, to assemble together, to come from the mountains, from the waters, from the rivers, from the rainwater on the roofs and from the oceans. Tell them to come to me.’
Legend has it also that the cats appeared and attacked the priest who was leading the expedition, but when the soldiers gave chase the cats simply vanished into thin air. As the expedition continued their search of the castle, they came across countless bodies of young women outside the surrounding walls; they had been simply tossed over the ramparts. Many of the bodies had no arms or legs. ‘We watched in horror as the dogs ran about with parts of the girls in their mouths,’ one shaken observer wrote.
Those who had helped Bathory in her crimes all suffered a horrible death. Their fingers were plucked out with red-hot shears and they were then thrown on to a fire and burned alive. Bathory’s dwarf helper Ficzko got off reasonably lightly with a relatively quick death: he was beheaded.
As punishment for her terrible crimes, Elizabeth Bathory was walled up inside her own castle, with only a small slit through which food was passed to her. She died four years later.
ONLY TRYING TO HELP: MIGUEL ANGEL RODRIGUEZ
According to Marisa Grinstein in her excellent book Mujeres Asesinas (‘Killer Women’), Buenos Aires had its very own killer witch: an effeminate, overweight homosexual who persuaded three women to kill their husbands in 1966. Arturo Miguel Angel Rodriguez was an ex-priest and tailor who read cards and offered advice and occult remedies for everyday problems to lonely – not to mention extremely gullible – women. Rodriguez (who also answered to the name of Monica) claimed that he had command over the spirit world, having learned his art in a long-lost Brazilian village, and hinted that his speciality was the creation of murder potions.
The first woman to kill her husband with Rodriguez’s help needed little persuasion. Juana Pugnetti was sick of her husband breathing down her neck and nagging her and wanted freedom to indulge in affairs. Her daughter, who was only 17 at the time (half her mother’s age), pretty much wanted the same thing. The two of them agreed that it would be better for them both if he dropped down dead. And the quicker the better.
Rodriguez initially refused to help, though. Seeing a useful way to draw the business out, and earn a fistful of pesos in the process, he told Pugnetti that the spirits wanted to give her husband a second chance. He told her to cut up a living toad, remove its entrails, put her husband’s name inside and then bury it. This, he claimed, would put her husband into a trance-like state for months, allowing her to come and go as she pleased. A furious Pugnetti came back a few weeks later: it hadn’t worked, she told him. In fact, her husband was even worse than before. So, after much consultation with the spirit world, Rodriguez told her that he had been given permission to create a murder potion. He asked her to meet him outside a nearby cemetery at eleven o’clock.
When they met that night, Rodriguez disappeared for an hour to find the ingredients and came back with what he claimed were the crushed bones from an arm and a human eyeball. This, he told Pugnetti grandly, was ‘the liquor of the gods’ and would kill her husband without arousing any suspicion. Pugnetti obediently slipped the potion into her husband’s food and hey presto – nothing at all. Once more, Pugnetti approached the witch. But Rodriguez, knowing that he couldn’t spin things out any longer, now offered a far more worldly solution: arsenic. And – for a fee, of course – he would commune with the spirit world to make sure that the manner of her husband’s death would remain undetected.
Rodriguez did almost exactly the same thing with two other unhappily married women. Nina Ponorilox’s justification for wanting her husband dead was that he regularly beat her. As well as going through the entire toad routine (which actually seemed to work!), she was told to light seven black candles over seven days and then flush the remaining wax in the toilet so that it would enter the river. She put arsenic in a cup of coffee and a lemon tea for her husband, who died that very same day.
The third unhappy wife, Margarita Tiadini, needed more persuasion, though. Tiadini was reluctant and squeamish. She had vomited when she had cut up the toad and subsequently had nightmares about it for weeks. Rodriguez, however, introduced her to his other two satisfied clients and they eagerly persuaded her to go ahead with her plan.
This time, though, it wasn’t so easy. Tiadini put arsenic in her husband’s soup, but the quantity wasn’t enough and he simply asked to see a doctor. Tiadini ran out of the house, saying she was on her way to fetch help, and came back instead with Rodriguez dressed up in a white coat. In the end the pair decided to inject the husband with the arsenic directly, but still her husband held on grimly to life for another two days. Indeed, he nearly managed to escape out of a back door at one point, but Rodriguez dragged him back in.
Meanwhile, Rodriguez’s first murderous client was now enjoying her newfound freedom and was running a brothel along with her daughter in their own home. Police had become suspicious about her husband’s sudden demise, however, and obtained a court order for an exhumation of the body; on discovering traces of arsenic, they came calling. It was the daughter who broke down and confessed first. When her mother learned that her daughter had blabbed, she led police to the other two murderesses too, and to Rodriguez. All were sentenced to 15 years in prison.
According to Marisa Grinstein, none of the widows showed any remorse for their crimes whatsoever, expressing instead profound relief that their husbands would bother them no longer. It was Rodriguez who felt the most hard done by. He told cellmates that he had only been trying to help and declared that it was because of those three women that he was now in prison. True to character, he cast a terrible spell to ensure that they would each endure a long and terrible death.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
TEENAGE KILLERS
Sometimes the bloody consequences of teen tantrums can be a truly terrible sight to behold.
Every year in the Unites States there are around 300 cases of teenagers who kill their own parents. While the vast majority of these cases involve teenagers who are lashing out against physical or sexual abuse, there are always a handful of cases of teens who kill for such mundane reasons as more pocket money, or simply because they want more time to hang out with their friends at the local mall. Cases like these invariably make headlines the world over; these are teenagers from loving families who kill their own parents for absolutely no real reason at all.
Take, for example, the murder of Peter and Patty Niedere by their son and his best friend in October 2005. Among other things, Matthew Niedere was sick of his parents nagging at him to go to church. So, one day, during physics class, he persuaded his best friend, Clayton Keister, to help him kill them both. After the pair had cold-bloodedly gunned down Niedere’s parents, they went shopping, mowed the lawn and got ready for a school dance, where they were later arrested. Both teenagers were convicted of first-degree murder.
While mean teens can kill because they want more cash or freedom, they can also kill out of love. In fact, the most disturbing and bizarre teenage parricides are often the result of warped teenage infatuation and obsessed teenagers are k
nown to have killed their parents and slaughtered romantic rivals without the slightest hesitation; adding insult to injury, these adolescent murderers often cast themselves afterwards as the heroic star-crossed lovers of the piece. But, as the following cases of teenage love gone homicidal show, Romeo and Juliet these teenagers certainly are not.
HEAVENLY CREATURES: PAULINE PARKER AND JULIET HULME
No list of murderous teenage crushes would be complete without at least a mention of the most famous teenage crush of them all: the romance that is alleged to have developed between Pauline Parker (16) and Juliet Hulme (15) in the summer of 1954. The murder of Pauline’s mother, Honora Parker, was the most famous murder case of the day in New Zealand and the story made headlines around the world after it was alleged by prosecutors at their trial that the two ‘dirty-minded little girls’ had been involved in an intense lesbian relationship for several months.
When both sets of parents began to suspect that their daughters’ friendship had turned ‘unhealthy’, they decided that the two would have to be separated and that Juliet Hulme should go to boarding school in South Africa. The pair, unaware that this was part of a plan to split them up, hoped that perhaps Pauline could accompany Juliet to South Africa, but Pauline’s mother strongly opposed the idea.
Unable to face the fact that they would soon be separated, the girls promptly started plotting. If Pauline’s mother was dead, then they just might be able to remain together and travel to South Africa with Pauline’s father. As they plotted the murder, Pauline Parker kept a diary in which she detailed her own mother’s impending death. ‘We have worked it all out carefully and are both thrilled with the idea. Naturally we feel a trifle nervous but the anticipation is great,’ she wrote. ‘I’m trying to think of some way. I want it to appear a natural or an accidental death. We discussed the “moider” fully, so next time I write in the diary Mother will be dead. How odd, yet how pleasing.’
On 22 June, the girls and Pauline’s mother went for a picnic in Victoria Park, Christchurch. When they reached a secluded spot, Juliet Hulme dropped a bright-pink stone on the path, which she had brought along with her for that purpose, and pointed it out to Honora Parker. When Honora bent down to look at it, her daughter beat her over the head with a brick wrapped in a stocking.
The girls had badly miscalculated, however, believing in their teenage rose-tinted fantasy world that Honora would somehow instantly drop dead with a minimum of fuss. Instead, it took over 40 blows to kill her. They had hoped to attribute the head injuries to a fall but the repeated blows, of course, made that impossible. Even so, they went ahead with their plan and rushed into a nearby tearoom, where they asked for help. They were immediately suspects in the case and when Pauline’s diaries were found the next day they were both arrested. Promptly convicted of murder, the pair served five years in separate jails and were famously released on the condition that they never meet again.
Nothing was heard about them for many years, until it emerged that Hulme, who now lives in Scotland, is a successful writer specialising in Victorian mysteries; under the pen name Anne Perry, she has sold over three million copies of her books. Pauline Parker, meanwhile, also moved to the UK, where for many years she taught mentally handicapped children in a special-needs school.
MATRICIDAL MANIAC: VALESSA ROBINSON
The story of Valessa Robinson, now serving a 20-year sentence for murder, makes Parker and Hulme’s murder look positively quaint by comparison.
Back in 1998, Valessa Robinson was a teenager and she was in love. ‘My true one and only love is Adam William Davis,’ she wrote in her diary in May 1998, ‘and pretty soon I’ll be Valessa Lyn Davis. We’re trying to get me pregnant because I want a baby so bad. Just imagine a little version of me running around, scary, isn’t it!’
Valessa’s boyfriend was 19-year-old Adam Davis – the archetypal bad boy from the other side of the tracks and any parent’s worst nightmare. Davis, who went by the name ‘Rattlesnake’, was a drifter with a long criminal record. In fact, although Valessa and Davis had been ‘going steady’ for seven months, for much of that time Davis had been serving time in the local jail for robbery.
Valessa Robinson, on the other hand, was only 16 years old. She lived in a pleasant house in the quiet suburb of Carrollwood in Tampa, Florida, with her recently divorced mother. But mother and daughter had not been seeing eye to eye for quite a while. In her free time, Valessa was tripping out on LSD, getting drunk, smashing in post boxes, hanging out with the wrong crowd and not coming home at night. Her grades were slipping, she was smoking and she had also recently been arrested for shoplifting. Robinson’s mother had watched all this with helpless horror, but the biggest point of conflict by far was Valessa’s boyfriend.
Valessa’s mother knew that her daughter was having sex, and had in fact caught the two at it under her own roof. She may also have known that the two planned to get married and there is evidence to suggest that she was reading her daughter’s journal. What is known for sure is that Vicki Robinson was finding it harder and harder to cope with her teenage offspring. After months of yelling and increasingly acrimonious arguments, she had become so desperate that she planned to enrol her daughter into a Christian boot camp called Stepping Stone Farm for an entire year.
She never got the chance.
On the night of Friday, 26 June 1998, Valessa Robinson, Adam Davis and 19-year-old John Whispel, a mutual friend of theirs, bought some LSD. While tripping in a Denny’s restaurant, Valessa suddenly announced to the two young men that she wanted her mother dead: ‘Let’s kill Mom.’
To begin with, it seemed like a joke – to Whispel, at least. But Davis and Robinson were serious and as they continued talking the two smitten teens soon became specific about the details. In the end, they hit upon a novel method. They would score some heroin and give Vicki Robinson an overdose.
But they couldn’t score any. Instead, they bought a syringe and drove back to the house, where Davis filled it with kitchen bleach. When Mrs Robinson walked into the kitchen in her nightgown, Davis, still tripping, grabbed her from behind and stabbed her in the neck. The syringe and the bleach didn’t work, though, so Davis stabbed her again – this time with a knife – killing her. Or at least that’s what they thought.
As the trio sat around smoking cigarettes in Valessa’s bedroom, they heard a low whimper coming from the kitchen. According to court testimony, it was at this point that Davis said, ‘The bitch won’t die.’ He then grabbed the knife, returned to the kitchen and stabbed Vicki Robinson twice in the neck, finally killing her. According to Whispel, who later testified against the pair in court, Valessa Robinson had then declared, ‘Well, now I’m free. I can do whatever I want.’
The three then stuffed Mrs Robinson’s body in a plastic rubbish bin, took it to a deserted spot near Whispel’s house and dumped it in some nearby bushes. Their initial idea was to encase the bin later in concrete and dump it in a nearby river. As it turned out, they never bothered. Instead, they used Vicki Robinson’s cash machine (Valessa knew the pin number) to get tattoos, eat junk food and buy more drugs in the nearby town of Ybor City, where they stayed for three days. Apparently in no hurry to make a run for it, the three seemed quite content to stay in motel rooms and watch movies such as Scream 2 on pay-for-view.
It wasn’t until they saw a news report that Vicki Robinson had been reported missing that they finally decided to flee, getting as far as Texas in her minivan. When sheriffs identified the vehicle, however, the trio were arrested. To begin with, Valessa, probably in order to protect her boyfriend, claimed that she had stabbed her mother after an argument. Davis, meanwhile, in his initial confession told detectives that he had killed Valessa’s mother because she had been trying to break the two up.
The love-struck couple tried to keep their romance going as far as it was possible even after they were arrested. While she was being led to a police car, Robinson told the assembled reporters, ‘I love Adam!’ And when the two were i
n the same court room during the pre-trial hearings, Robinson couldn’t resist smiling at her dreamboat across the room and casting coy glances in his direction – much to the annoyance of Circuit Judge Cynthia Holloway, who ordered them both to cut it out.
Whispel had always been the odd man out and duly testified against Davis and Robinson in return for a second-degree murder charge, stating that Valessa had held her mother down while Davis had stabbed her with the syringe. Valessa was too young to face the death penalty but she did face spending the rest of her natural life in jail for the count of first-degree murder. In one of the biggest upsets in the history of the State of Florida, however, her lawyers were able to secure a conviction on the lesser charge of third-degree murder, persuading the jury that two adult men had manipulated her. The decision of the court means that in all likelihood Valessa will leave prison while still in her thirties. Whispel, as part of a plea-bargain agreement, got 25 years, while Valessa’s ex-teenage love, Davis, now awaits execution on Death Row.
GROUNDED FOR LIFE
Perhaps the meanest teen of all time is the 13-year-old girl in Canada who recently wiped out her entire family with the help of her boyfriend, just because her parents disapproved of the relationship and had grounded her. In one of the bloodiest murders in Canadian history, on 22 April 2006, the teenage duo stabbed the girl’s parents to death, as well as her brother, who was just eight years old. According to court transcripts, he begged his sister to spare him his life but to no avail. His sister (who cannot be named here for legal reasons) stabbed him twice in the chest, then handed her brother over to her boyfriend who slit the boy’s throat.
While it was the boyfriend who had actually carried out the killings, it was ruled that the girl had purposefully and intentionally encouraged and persuaded him to kill her family. This emerged after several witnesses had come forward to testify that they had heard her say that she hated her family and wanted them all dead, while others had overheard her asking her boyfriend to kill them.
The World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 14