Crime Blog

[morbidology]

The central and peripheral nervous system of a human being.

[morbidology]

119 people died at the Winecoff in the worst hotel fire in U.S. history. When the fire started on the third floor at 3:30AM, many guests didn’t even know it until their rooms filled with smoke. Fire ladders reached only to the 7th floor of the 15-story hotel. Arnold Hardy, student at GA Tech, won a Pulitzer for a picture he snapped of a woman in mid-air who had jumped from the 11th floor. 

She miraculously survived, but 119 jumped to their deaths or were burned beyond recognition.

[dailyunsolvedmysteries]

Mothman -  The Silver Bridge Collapse

The Main Street in Point Pleasant, West Virginia led straight onto an eyebar-chain style suspension bridge named “The Silver Bridge”, based on its aluminium paint, that went across the Ohio river to Gallipolis, Ohio. The bridge was built in 1928. Locals would cross it on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day. At 5:05 Pm on December 15th 1967, exactly 13 months after the first Mothman sightings, the bridge was full of cars, many of them Christmas shoppers, when suddenly it began to shake. They heard the low moaning of metal and then a loud screech.

Mary Hyre was a newspaper reporters who wrote articles about the Mothman and was a close friend of John Keel, Writer of the Mothman Prophecies, they teamed up to interview witnesses of The Mothman. On November 19th 1967, she told Keel: “I had a terrible nightmare. There were a lot of people drowning in the river and Christmas packages were floating everywhere in the water. Its like something awful is going to happen.” When Keel returned to Point Pleasant around Thanksgiving 1967, people in the area were having dreams and nightmares about a coming disaster. Virginia Thomas had them about people dying the water of the nearby Ohio River.

In an interview, Bridge Collapse Survivor, Charlene Wood said “When I got to the traffic light, here in point pleasant, I got the red light. When it changed I started going up onto the bridge and just about that time, the bridge started shaking”. She heard a loud noise and thought that a boat had hit into the bridge underneath. She reversed her vehicle as the bridge began folding inward on itself, with her tires stopped on the ledge where it broke off.

The Bridge collapsed into the water below. Forty Six people died, nine were injured and two victims were never found. making it the worst bridge accident in  American history at the time. For days rescue workers pulled smashed cars and bodies from the river. Debris littered the water, the tragedy had happened on the coldest day of the year.

The department of transportation conducted a detailed investigation of the collapse and found the cause to be a small 0.1 inch (2.5 mm) deep defect on the 13th steel pin eye-bar on the bridge that was improperly manufactured.

With all the sightings happening from around November 15th 1966, to December 15th 1967 and then suddenly stopping, it seemed as if it was all building towards the event.

A couple of sightings of Mothman were said to have occurred near the bridge before the incident. Rumors eventually spread that the bridge collapse was connected to the Mothman in some way and that he could have been a warning or a dark premonition. This was the beginning of The Mothman being associated as an “Omen of Doom”. Mothman eventually began being reportedly seen all over the world before tragedies struck and the creature went from small town folklore to global monster icon.

[morbidology]

Trepanation, or trepanning, is a procedure where sharp instruments were used to bore holes through the skull. It is the oldest surgery know to man. It was practiced as early as 10,000 B.C. and was commonly used to treat head-related illnesses both mental and physical. Trepanning was performed without anesthesia, so that the patient was awake during the procedure. Trepanning was practiced well into the 18th century.

[morbidology]

T4 was codename for euthanasia activities performed by Nazi doctors during WWII. T4 was a program of forced euthanasia on the mentally and physically disabled, including children. Children of mixed marriages, disabled soldiers, the sick and anybody else considered “unworthy of life” were also killed. At first, the program’s personnel killed people by starvation and lethal injection, but they later chose asphyxiation by poison gas.

Between 1939 and 1945, 200,000 people died under T4 guidelines.

[morbidology]

The Mummies of Venzone, Italy. A fungus grows in the Cathedral graves there that dehydrates a body in one year and makes the skin parchmentlike. Since the bodies were so recognizable, sometimes villagers would retrieve their loved ones for some quality time.

[morbidology]

In 2006, a looter searching for antiques in an ancient Mayan archaeological site slipped and fell to the bottom of a cave in Belize, landing on a pile of human bones. In 2016, a study concluded that the bones were of those who died as a human sacrifice, with most belonging to children ranging between 6-years-old to 14-years-old. Researchers even commented that the children could have been victims of a child trafficking ring. The cave was named “Midnight Terror Cave” and it was revealed that the morbid pit of bones was created some 3,000 years ago and over a 1,500 year period, at least 144 bodies were thrown into the cave.

[truecrimeinvestigation]

amanda knox (2016); dir. rod blackhurst &brian mcginn

[morbidology]

Genie was born in California in 1957. Her father determined that she was mentally disabled and therefore not worthy of his attention or care. He isolated her from everybody, locking her alone inside a room until she reached the age of 13. While inside this room, he kept her strapped to a toilet or enclosed in a crib. Due to her isolation, she was incapable of communicating or walking when she was finally rescued by Los Angeles child welfare authorities on 4 November, 1970. 

Her father would beat her with a plank wood each time she attempted to communicate with her family and would bark and growl at her like a dog to intimidate her. This instilled a severe fear of dogs which continued after she was rescued. He even grew his fingernails for the sole purpose of scratching Genie if she ever “misbehaved.” 

After Genie was rescued, she was often used as a case study for psychologists, linguists, and scientists. She was sent into care and while there, there appeared to be a series of breakthroughs in the beginning. However, there were also major setbacks - she was exploited and also abused by those who were supposed to be caring for her. She was sent to an extremely religious foster care home in which she retreated and in 1977, she managed to tell a children’s hospital that her foster parents had physically punished her when she had been sick. 

Following this, her speech never recovered and nobody knows for sure what became of her other than she was sent to an institute for the mentally undeveloped in Southern California in 2008.

[morbidology]

On 13 July, 2012, 8-year-old Elizabeth Collins and her cousin, 10-year-old Lyric Cook, took a short bike ride to their grandmother’s house in Evansdale, Iowa, never to return. Their bikes and Elizabeth’s purse were discovered near Lake Meyer not too long after they were reported as missing. Investigators searched the surrounding area and sent divers into the nearby lake. However, no trace of the girls could be found. That was until 5 December, 2012, when some local hunters discovered the slain bodies of the two young cousins. They had been abducted, murdered, and then dumped in a rural Bremer County wildlife area. Regardless of the fact that investigators have received many tips and many leads in the murder of the two girls, the perpetrator has still not been identified.

[crimesandcuriosities]

The footage above show 18 year old Leonid Greyser trying to break out of a glass holding box in a Moscow courtroom. Greyser was arrest in 2019 for the brutal murder of his older sister, 21 year old Ariada Korol, which he claims was a sacrificial killing in order to rid himself of Satan.

He was able to slip through the bars slatted across the top of the box and attempt a getaway through the ceiling tiles, but officers present were able to prevent his escape with the use of batons and tasers - although the defendant lost his trousers in the process.

Greyser shared an apartment with his sister and claimed to have had a "perfect" relationship with her, although when questioned by authorities, he stated: “It was necessary. I did what I had to do." Neighbours were alarmed to hear Ariada screaming in a hallway of the apartment building, where her body was then found having sustained multiple stab wounds.

Greyser was also witnessed at the scene, where he allegedly undressed whilst praying and drew demonic symbols on his head and sister's body using her blood.

[morbidology]

This video is the last known footage of Lars Mittank, who disappeared from an airport in Bulgaria after acting very peculiarly. Who, or what, was he running from still remains a mystery…

‪On the 30th of June, 2014, 28-year-old Lars Mittank from Germany travelled to the seaside resort of Golden Sands in Bulgaria with several of his friends for a vacation. While the holiday was off to a great start, on the 6th of July, Mittank got into a fight with several other men over a football disagreement. The fight resulted in Mittank suffering a ruptured ear drum.

The following day, Mittank and his friends were scheduled to fly home. However, a doctor advised Mittank that he shouldn’t fly and prescribed him the antibiotic, Cefuroxima 500. Mittank’s friends didn’t want to leave him but he assured them that he would be safe in Bulgaria on his own. He would be home in a few days, he told them.

After his friends left, Mittank checked into a cheap hotel. Shortly after his arrival, he was said to begin acting very peculiarly and his mysterious behaviour was caught on CCTV. He spent just one night at the hotel but was said to be very paranoid and scared. He sent messages to his mother stating that he didn’t feel safe in the hotel and asked if she would cancel his credit cards. He also told her that four men had been following him and asking him where his pills were.

The next morning, he got a taxi to the airport where he asked his mother to book him a flight home. In the airport, he went to the doctor. During his examination, Mittank just got up and fled from the airport on foot. He can be seen clearly on the CCTV footage from the airport. Witnesses said he climbed over a fence and jumped into a field where he then disappeared into the woods.

He hasn’t been seen since.

[morbidology]

It was a warm summer’s afternoon in Clarion County, Pennsylvania, on the 22nd of July, 1990. A group of children were searching for berries alongside a remote railroad trestle along Road 535 when they were met by a grim sight. Lying face down in a stream bed was the lifeless body of a woman.

The woman had been bludgeoned across the side of the head with a heavy object, resulting in death. In addition, her right leg had been broken. She had been murdered approximately one month before the discovery. 

Due to decomposition, an accurate age approximation could not be determined - they estimated her to be anywhere from 15-years-old to 40-years-old. She stood at about 5 feet tall and had shoulder length brunette hair. She had taken care of her teeth and had no fillings or signs of decay. She did, however, have a chip in one of the upper teeth. She was fully clothed other than a bra and shoes which were missing. Inside her jean pockets was a penny.

Authorities determined that “Penny Doe” was not a local woman. They theorized that the killer was local, however, as her body was discarded in an obscured area. There he been an open air rock festival approximately 15 miles from where her body was discovered. Over 5,100 people attended the event which took place on Memorial Day. Police considered that “Penny Doe” had travelled to attend the festival where she may have met her killer.

The case went cold until 2002 when authorities received an anonymous letter about the murdered girl. They were unable to trace the letter and never heard from the writer again. “Penny Doe” still remains unidentified and her killer, unknown.

[morbidology]

On 21 October, 1978, 20-year-old “flying saucer enthusiast” Frederick Valentich disappeared while on a solo training flight over Bass Strait, Australia. During this flight, he radioed air traffic control to report another aircraft orbiting around him at around 1,000 feet above him, and that unexplainably, his own engine had began to run roughly. Suddenly, he blurted out “It’s not an aircraft…” before the line went dead. Valentich was never seen nor heard from again. Many UFOlogists have speculated that his aircraft was destroyed by aliens or that they even abducted him. They report that other individuals witnessed seeing “an erratically moving green light in the sky” on the day of his disappearance. 

[crimediet-deactivated20210629]

The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel

Anneliese Michel was born September 21, 1952, to a devoutly religious family. At 16, she began suffering seizures and was diagnosed with epilepsy, however prescribed drugs didn't help.

Within 3 years, she became depressed and heard voices that told her she was 'damned' and 'would rot in hell'. She even grew an aversion to churches and crucifixes. On a Christian pilgrimage to San Damiano, a family friend concluded that Anneliese was possessed. "[She] was unable to enter the shrine. She approached it with the greatest hesitation, then said that the soil burned like fire and she simply could not stand it...She looked at the people who were kneeling...and it seemed to her that while praying they were gnashing their teeth...she had to avert her glance from the picture of Christ...she could no longer look at medals or pictures of saints; they sparkled so immensely that she could not stand it." - Father Alt

Her family consulted a priest about an exorcism, though the priests declined and suggested medicine. Anneliese soon began growling, throwing things, self-injuring and drinking her own urine. She even ate insects, coal, and once bit the head off of a dead bird. Despite taking numerous neuroleptic medications, her symptoms persisted.

In 1975, Bishop Josef Stangl allowed priest Arnold Renz to exorcise. Father Renz performed the first session on September 24, 1975. In total, 67 exorcisms were performed, twice a week, for up to 4 hours each time.

On July 1, 1976, Anneliese died at home from malnutrition and dehydration after undergoing self-starvation for a year during her exorcisms. She weighed 68 pounds at the time of her death and had broken knees from continuously kneeling to pray.

After an investigation, it was determined that Anneliese's death could've been prevented. The state charged her parents, Father Alt, and Father Renz with negligent homicide.

During the trial, tapes of 42 exorcisms were played. In them, Anneliese speaks as a demon and identifies as Lucifer, Cain, Judas, Hitler and Nero. Anneliese's parents, Father Alt, and Father Renz were all found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 6 months in jail.

[sixpenceee]

Earthquake shaking water out of a pool

(Source)

[luvnaught]

Woah.  Hope no one was in it at the time!

[morbidology]

15-year-old Jessica Lyn Keen was an avid cheerleader and honour student at Westland High School. She had always been ambitious and dreamed of becoming a singer or actress. Her grades started to drop shortly after she met her boyfriend, Shawn Thompson. Her mother ultimately forbid her from seeing him until her grades improved. After an argument, Jessica’s mother sent her to a centre for troubled teenagers.

Just two weeks after, on the 15th of March, 1991, Jessica had an argument with Shawn before going to the mall. The last time she was seen alive was at approximately 6PM at a nearby bus stop. Two days later, her body was discovered in Foster Chapel Cemetery. It was theorised that she had been abducted by her killer and at one point, managed to escape and fled into the cemetery. Evidence showed that she had knelt down behind a gravestone in an attempt to hide from her killer. It was no use.

She had been raped and beaten to death with an old gravestone that had been pulled from the ground. The first suspect was her boyfriend, Shawn, but he was ruled out early on. He hadn’t been in the state at the time and his DNA didn’t match. The case eventually went cold but in 2009, Marvin Lee Smith, a convicted felon, was charged with her murder. While he wasn’t a suspect, new law ordered that convicted felons provide a DNA sample for a state database. He was sentenced to 30 years.