Crime Slime

True crime, cult psychology, antiquated medicine, unexplained mysteries

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Jeffrey R. MacDonald

On the night of February 17, 1970, dispatchers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina received a call from Jeffrey MacDonald, a surgeon with the Green Berets, who reported “a stabbing”. Military police officers would enter the MacDonalds’ home to find Jeffrey’s pregnant wife, Colette, on the floor of the bedroom, clubbed, stabbed 21 times with an ice pick and 16 times with a knife. The couple’s 5 year old daughter Kimberly was found in her own bed, clubbed and stabbed eight times in the neck with a knife. Their other daughter, 2 year old Kristen, was in her own bed, stabbed 33 times with a knife and 15 times with an ice pick. 

A message, written in blood, was to be seen above Colette’s bed: “Pig.” 

MacDonald claimed that at 2am a group of four hippies - three men and one woman - broke into the house, holding candles and chanting “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” He claimed they then committed the murders. MacDonald himself had been stabbed, but only once, which he claimed he had received when trying to fight off the intruders before being knocked unconscious. 

Investigators found the circumstances highly suspicious. MacDonald had suffered far fewer wounds than his family - not to mention, the details of his story seemed awfully similar to the details of the Tate-LaBianca murders committed by the Manson Family the previous year, which was currently in the news. 

MacDonald would be convicted of murdering his family, but maintains his innocence to this day.

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The Four Humors 

An ancient Greek theory made popular by the physician Galen of Pergamon, Humorism is a medical practice wherein it is believed that four main bodily fluids, called humors, control everything in the body, from organ function to mental health. The goal of Humorism was to maintain perfect balance of these four fluids, which was known as eucrasia. If the humors became out of balance, a patient was in a state of dyscrasia. 

The four humors were blood, yellow bile (believed to form in the spleen), black bile (believed to form in the gallbladder), and phlegm. Each humor was associated with a temperament, those being sanguine, choler, melancholy, and phlegmatic, respectively. Dyscrasia of the humors could lead to shifts in mood; for instance, a patient with an overabundance of black bile would be angst-ridden and depressed. 

Humors were treated in a variety of ways, largely with herbs but also with certain foods. These food pairings were largely based on color (red berries to increase blood, for instance) or with opposing properties (phlegm was wet, so a phlegmy patient would be fed dry foods). 

While humorism has been discredited by modern medicine, parts of the theory still hang around. Most notably, the term melancholy is still used to refer to depression, and modern personality tests such as Myers-Briggs probably have the personality diagnostic tools of humorism to thank for existing. 

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The Moberly-Jourdain Incident

Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were administrators of St Hugh’s College, a women’s college associated with Oxford. In August of 1901, the two took a trip to the Palace of Versailles. Finding the palace boring, they look at another structure on the grounds, the Petit Trianon. They became lost on their way, and began to feel a strange, oppressive atmosphere. They continued to walk through the palace grounds, passing people in strange old-fashioned garb, including a woman in a summer dress and hat. 

The two came up with the theory that they had either witnessed ghosts of the old palace, or had briefly time-travelled, believing the woman in the dress and hat to be Marie Antoinette herself. 

The two published a book on the event, though it came under heavy criticism, as they likely simply misinterpreted normal events, and many of their details of the palace grounds did not actually exist.

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The Bleeding House

On the evening of September 8, 1987, Minnie Winston stepped out of the bath and noticed a pool of blood on her bathroom floor. There was also blood on the bathroom walls and on the hallway floor. Blood would also be found in the kitchen, living room, and bedroom walls as well as under appliances. She herself was not injured, nor was her husband. The couple called the police who could find no signs of a break-in, but who did take samples of the blood. Tests revealed the blood to be type O, which matched neither of the homeowners. 

No source for the blood was ever found despite the amount indicating that someone had been seriously injured inside the home. The couple would be harassed by press who believed it to be a hoax, but always maintained that they were not perpetrating a hoax and had no idea where the blood came from.

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The Murder of Mark Kilroy

Mark Kilroy was an American college student enjoying his spring break vacation in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico when he was kidnapped and murdered as part of a human sacrifice by Adolfo Constanzo. Constanzo was a practitioner of Palo, a Cuban religion of African origin that uses natural objects, mainly sticks, infused with spiritual powers to perform magic. Constanzo performed rituals for cartels, offering them his powers as a form of protection. Kilroy was murdered by a machete blow to the head and his brain was removed and boiled as part of a Palo ritual. 

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Cult Profile: The Order of the Solar Temple

Founded in Geneva in 1984 by Luc Jouret and Joseph Di Mambro, the Order of the Solar Temple (Ordre du Temple Solaire, or OTS, in French) is a secret society that traces its roots back to the Knights Templar. 

The OTS combined the occult with medieval legend and Christianity, holding bizarre rituals. Di Mambro would maintain that the world was rapidly coming to an end, and that his daughter was had been divinely conceived. However, in 1991, membership in the cult began to decline and the group came under investigation by the Canadian government. 

With his power unraveling, Di Mambro took to encouraging his followers to horrible acts. They murdered three month old Emmanuel Dutoit, son of ex-cult member Tony Dutoit, with a wooden stake, accusing him of being the Antichrist. His parents were also murdered. Five days later, 23 cult members in Fribourg, Switzerland committed ritual murder/suicide, and at the same time, 25 people in Valais did the same. Among the dead were a number of children, and the cult leaders themselves.

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Medieval woodcut depicting the Four Humors

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The Tylenol Murders

On this day, September 29, in 1982, a series of odd, sudden deaths occurred in the Chicago area. Investigations showed that each victim had taken Extra Strength Tylenol in openable capsule form just minutes before their deaths. Further investigation showed that the victims had suffered from cyanide poisoning, and that capsules in the bottles of Tylenol had been opened and filled with the poison. 

Each bottle had the exact same number of pills present, suggesting either an incredibly organized killer, or pointing towards contamination somewhere in the line of production. To the credit of Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturer of the pills, all Tylenol was pulled from the market nationwide within a week of the deaths.

While theories about the murderer have been put forth, including specific targeting or terrorism, but the case remains unsolved.

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Visit Original Link

What you are listening to here is one of the transmissions that has become known as “The Beacon of Hate”. 

In 2000, an amateur Ham Radio operator picked up a Morse code signal on the 10.1064 MHz frequency. The messages lasted 2001 and included cryptic, inflammatory statements about the US Government, camels, the devil, and threats of genocide. The message in this post was the first, which read “THE US GOV RIPED OFF THE CAMELS THEY CAN'T PUT IN GOD WE TRUS MN THE MONEY” 

The FCC did not investigate. 

No one knows what exactly the messages meant or who was sending them.

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Kinda forgot about this blog, oops! Coming back for the month of October but would like to stick around longer, if you have any requests or suggestions for posts please send me a message!

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Origins of El Chupacabra

Most people who are into cryptids know El Chupacabra. “The Goat Sucker” is said to be a vampiric creature, scrawny, hairless, covered in spikes. The first reports of the creature began in Puerto Rico in 1995, as farmers supposedly found their goats exsanguinated, with two holes left in their necks. Shortly after, eye witness accounts began to pour in, beginning with Madelyne Tolentino, a Puerto Rican woman who described a bipedal creature with black eyes, short hair combed to its body, and a row of spikes down its back. This description would be repeated by other witnesses for some time, before being phased out with descriptions of a more canine-esque animal. 

So why the change? 

Because Tolentino wasn’t describing a monster she had witnessed, but a movie. 

The scifi film Species had been released earlier in 1995, featuring Sil, a monster designed by H.R. Giger. That monster looked like this:

Benjamin Radford, author of Tracking the Chupacabra, interviewed Tolentino and noted the similarities between the description of El Chupacabra and Sil. Radford inquired as to whether or not Tolentino had seen the film, and sure enough, she had. The goat sucker was no alien or monster, but a woman letting her imagination run wild after seeing a scary movie. 

As for the more canine depictions? Turns out a coyote with mange looks an awful lot like a vampiric alien:

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Randy Bilyeu and Forrest Fenn’s Treasure

In 1988, a wealthy art dealer hid a chest supposedly full of treasure somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, leaving behind a poem that supposedly left clues to the location. Thrill-seekers from all over have traveled to New Mexico and Colorado seeking the treasure, all leaving empty-handed. 

But one should be cautious when looking for buried treasure. 

54-year-old Randy Bilyeu went missing in New Mexico in January of 2016 as he was looking for the treasure. In July of the same year, his remains were found in a river near Santa Fe. Bilyeu’s death is undetermined, but with no leads in the case and no signs of foul play, the case was closed. 

Fenn, it should be noted, is still alive, and has stated he feels horrible about the loss of a life - but he still won’t give up the location of his treasure. 

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The Legend of Andrew McCrew

Andrew McCrew was a one-legged African-American homeless man found dead on a train track with his other leg missing, likely severed by a train, in 1913. Though his body was taken to a morgue, as a transient, he had no family that could claim his body, which stayed in the undertaker’s possession for a year. The undertaker had done such a good job of preserving the body that it had become mummified. 

Eventually, a travelling carnival took possession of the body and put it on display as an oddity. 

McCrew’s body would serve as a carnival for 40 years until sold to a private buyer who mostly kept the corpse in a shed for the next 15 years. He would eventually be bought by a nurse, Elgie Pace, who stored the body in her basement until she could afford to bury him, in 1973.

The folk musician Don McLean (of American Pie fame) eventually heard of the story and was so moved by it that he wrote a song, The Legend of Andrew McCrew, and donated all proceeds of the song to buying a more substantial headstone for the gravesite. 

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Pretty Polly is an American murder ballad with roots going back possibly as far as the 1700s. 

Murder ballads are a genre of folk music generally depicting the events leading up to and surrounding murders, sometimes dealing with the aftermath of the event. Many are based in a factual event, but as the songs generally travel by word of mouth, they quickly stretch or change the truth. 

Pretty Polly depicts a woman being lured into the woods by a man who then kills her and buries her in a shallow grave. Some versions expand on this story, giving the villain a more clear backstory, and involving ghosts. The song can be traced back to a broadside ballad from the 1700s, and has been performed and altered by many artists. The above video is an adaptation by the band Vandaveer.

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The Hidden Treasure of the De Anza Motor Lodge

Albuquerque citizens may recognize it as one of the last crumbling relics of the Route 66 hotel industry. Eagle-eyed fans of Breaking Bad may remember that it was the location where Walter White made a drug exchange while his wife went into labor. For me, it was a building I drove past every day on the way to and from work, the ideal creepy mid-century motel that would be ideal for urban exploration, were it not for the blatant security guard seated behind the high metal fence. 

A question always plagued me -- why would a deteriorating old motel have a security guard?

Turns out, like a plot out of a made-for-TV adventure movie, it’s because the old motel is housing a priceless artifact. 

Built in 1939 by Charles Wallace, the former operator of a Zuni trading post, its basement contains seven huge murals depicting the Zuni pueblo’s sacred Shalako ceremony painted by Zuni artist Tony Edaakie. The murals are priceless and one-of-a-kind, and despite the motor lodge long being closed for business, have never been moved. There are plans to redevelop the historic motel in January of 2017, with plans of displaying the paintings once again.

Photo credit (x)

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Satanic Ritual Abuse

Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), otherwise known as Satanic Panic was a cultural phenomenon in late 1980s-early 1990s America. The rise of the religious right, coupled with the rise of heavy metal counterculture and the true occult elements of a smattering of big-name crimes lead to a modern day witch hunt. Conspiracy theories of a worldwide network of Satanists who were abusing children abounded on talk shows, and numerous crimes were supposedly linked to devil-worship. 

Some accusations were less impactful, such as implications of back-masked messages in heavy metal albums or the targeting of Dungeons and Dragons as being occult. Others, however, were far more damaging, ruining lives as innocent people were accused of horrible crimes perpetrated in the name of Satanism that had never occurred at all.

Almost all links to SRA were eventually proven to be false. 

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Hydnellum Peckii

Hydnellum Peckii, also known as ‘bleeding tooth fungus’, a hydnoid fungus that oozes a dark red blood-like pigment known to have anticoagulant properties.