July 23, 1987: It was a sweltering New Mexico summer when a bizarre and gruesome act of fetal abduction occurred.
Darci Pierce was a deranged 19 year old who had kidnapped 8 and a half months pregnant Cindy Ray from an obstetrics clinic under the threat of a toy gun, and took her to an isolated forest location.
She proceeded to cut Cindy’s premature baby out of her belly with car keys, killing the poor 23 year old mother to be in the process. Darci bit the umbilical cord with her teeth to sever it.
The unusual murder weapon
Cindy was a devout Mormon and known to be very moral and kind, and was already the mother of 1 child previously.
Darci was abandoned at age 11 and raised by foster parents. She despised her stepmother who she claimed was “fat, poor and ugly.”
Darci was also a charlatan who had lied to her husband, friends and family about her pregnancy. She had gained 60 lbs and stuffed her clothing to make her belly seem larger.
Sweet mom-to-be, Cindy Ray
Darci was desperate for a baby, as she had miscarried twice before, and despite being barely 20 she could not wait any longer. Her husband was expecting her to give birth at any moment, and her family had already thrown her a baby shower.
During the murder, a man in a pickup truck drove by the wooded area and had stopped his truck on the highway to question Darci on why she was pulled by the side of the road. Darci insisted repeatedly “My friend and I need to be alone,” and seeing another woman (Cindy) sprawled on the ground, the man assumed they were having a liaison and left.
Darci in her drab prison ‘fit
Miraculously, the baby had survived despite being savagely ripped from her mother’s womb under a tree in the desert.
Darci went to a hospital covered in mud and blood, and claimed the baby was hers. However, doctors quickly realized that Darci had never given birth and she confessed to murdering Cindy.
Darci led officers to the scene of the crime, and when she saw the mutilated body of her victim, she became hysterical and screamed, “Get me out of here. Please kill me.”
Cindy and her previous baby
Despite pleading insanity, Darci is now spending life in jail. Cindy’s husband remarried and raised a happy and healthy daughter who managed to survive the trauma of her birth.
Ruslana Sergeyevna Korshunova was known as the “Russian Rapunzel” for her long cascading locks and ethereal good looks. Admirers from every corner of the earth marveled over her glinting crystal blue eyes, compared to the ice of the Siberian taiga, and her youthful beauty and elegant 5’8 frame. She was on the front covers of Elle and Vogue, and modeled for IMG, whose client list includes the likes of Kate Moss and Lauren Hutton. She lived in a world of glamour and money.
All this could not keep her alive: She died in June of 2008, days before her 21st birthday, falling to death from her ninth floor apartment building. Police deemed it a suicide.
Almost immediately, controversy, conspiracy theories, psychological analyses, and curiosity followed. How could such a gorgeous, young, successful girl kill herself? And did she really, or was she murdered?
Ruslana had lived a short but charmed life. Her father, a former Red Army officer, died when she was only 5 years old.
She was very close to her mother Valentina, a cosmetic company executive, who would be her most intimate confidante and best friend until her death. In fact, Valentina had washed Ruslana’s long hair her whole life, until she went to Paris to model and was forced to do it alone for the first time.
A pal of Ruslana’s would admit after her death that “the most important thing about her and her internal world was that she was lonely. There was no one who was really dear to her, except for her mother.”
The family lived in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and were not financially deprived in any way. Ruslana went to one of the best schools in the city, and wanted to eventually go to university in Germany.
But at the age of 15, Ruslana’s life changed in a flash. After her photos were printed in a magazine in 2003, she was noticed by agent Debbie Jones from Models 1, who was immediately struck by her alluring appearance.
She was deemed “A Face to Be Excited About” by Vogue magazine, and Debbie went on to say that “everyone… adores Ruslana. I saw her by chance and she looked like something out of a fairytale! We had to find her and we searched high and low until we did! She’s really incredible with feline features and timeless beauty.”
The fairy tale would not last long, but it was exhilarating. Valentina was hesitant about letting her daughter enter the lurid modelling business, and preferred that Ruslana went to college instead, claiming there was no future in the industry. Ruslana refused, and wouldn’t stop pestering her mom until she agreed to accompany her to a casting call in London.
Ruslana still had braces, and was a naive wide-eyed girl in a big Western European city. She had no idea what she was in for. The world of coked up, anorexic, cynical and desperate fashion models was still alien to her, and she tried to retain a constant mantra in the wake of this new chaos:“Instead of moaning at the thorns/I’m happy that a rose among them grows.”
Money was scarce at this time and modelling gigs were few and far in between. A friend of Ruslana’s from this period describes how “in Paris and Milan there’d be these dinners, rich men would pay to come, we could join in for free. Ruslana and I would go. It would be our only chance to eat. The men could tell we were not like THAT. We were dunces, the ones who went to bed early.” In other words: they didn’t put out; look but don’t touch, etc.
Ruslana was packed into crammed flats full of aspiring models, waiting for her big break. She received this when she was 18 years old, in the form of a Nina Ricci fragrance commercial.
In the ad, she wears a pale pink backless ball gown, and climbs up a pile of apples to pluck the fruit-shaped perfume bottle down from a tree. It was this corny yet indelibly dreamy piece of advertising that turned her into a star.
Soon she was flying high, being invited to New York and Moscow’s classiest parties, and being barraged with the attentions of dozens of wealthy suitors. Alarmingly, she was even summoned to covert parties thrown by Jeffrey Epstein on his creepy private island.
Unfortunately for Ruslana, she soon fell in love with a wealthy unnamed Russian oligarch who brutally broke her heart. Friends say that the man was attractive and super rich, and she fell head over heels for him. She wanted marriage and children, and even introduced him to her mother, but to the oligarch, this was only a temporary fling.
He began ignoring Ruslana’s desperate phone calls, and the oligarch’s personal assistant requested she leave him alone. Being dumped caused Ruslana to lose her mind. She lost weight and became fraught by depression. She would never recover from this disappointment.
Years later, in March of 2008, Ruslana would write on her blog:
“Why, sooner or later, love will die. What is even worst is if it will end earlier for my partner than for me. It really hurts when someone stops loving you but you continue to love.
Reason says that it is better to be loved, but in life, we love more often than we are loved. To love, especially without return, is very hard, painful and takes away from the soul’s strength.”
And so she went through a string of disappointing relationships. She grew anxious about finding the “right one,” and often dated several men at a time, hoping one would take. A friend noted how “she was always searching for love. I used to say to her never search for love. The love will find you.” But she kept pining for true romance, and making bleak choices in the process.
To add on to personal injuries, Ruslana’s career began experiencing a decline at this time. It wasn’t completely over, but employment did start to dry up. A friend said she balked at the world’s newfound indifference to her: “She couldn’t understand. Suddenly she was one of a thousand girls. One of a million. A no one.” The world of fashion is a cold one; here today, gone tomorrow. The phone had stopped ringing.
Ruslana’s life became more stressful than the 20 year old could handle. She was still making $5k per fashion show and photoshoot, but sent much of that money back home to her mom and brother. She rented out a Manhattan apartment for a whole year at the price of $40k, and lived mostly alone, or with whichever man she was currently dating.
With her family on the other side of the world and constant unstable relationships being her only close sense of support, she started crumbling under the pressure. It was around this time that Ruslana joined a self-help cult named Rose of the World. Similar to Scientology in its operation, the Rose stems from a 1980s American cult named Lifespring, which was banned at its outset.
In training sessions, participants are encouraged to share their most traumatic life experiences and mistakes. They are then told to accept responsibility for these, and it is supposed to purge members of their demons. The sessions can run up to $1,000 for only three days. Desperate and isolated, this became Ruslana’s only emotional outlet. She was said to be extremely vocal at these sessions.
Friends reported a change in Ruslana, noticing she began moody, agitated and aggressive after her sessions at the Rose. She attended the program for three months. Former participants claim the organization gave them PTSD and emotional scars, but fellow model Anna Barsukova said “it’s a popular thing to do. One of my friends went there too… They do training about developing your personality.” However, there was a dark side- Ukrainian model Anastasia Drozdova also committed suicide by jumping after attending the Rose for a year.
According to a friend from the Rose, Ruslana told them her darkest secrets, talking tearfully about her failed romantic relationships and her father’s death. One claims “she tried suicide five times in different ways. She’s tried it since she was 15, 16 years old. It was a loneliness that no one understood.” One must note that those were the ages upon which she began her modelling career.
When questioned about Ruslana’s death, a Rose life coach had harsh words: to him, she was a “typical victim. Sometimes it’s better to commit suicide than not to change.”
Ruslana had also been embroiled in a lawsuit with her former agent, who she sued for $500k due to embezzlement of funds. She complained to acquaintances about money troubles, and told her mother she was getting fed up with the modelling business and wanted to eventually leave it.
The most salient insights into Ruslana’s psyche lie in her personal blog. She explains herself in her own words, growing more and more frustrated in the months before her death:
Jan 2008
It hurts as if someone took a part of me, mercilessly tore it out, stomped all over it…threw it out.
If I am for others, then who is for me? And if I am for myself, then what am I for?
Feb 2008
there’s disorder! i don’t have a home. I need an boss for there to be order
Mar 2008
my dream is to fly..oh my rainbow is too high..
I’m a bitch. I’m a witch. I don’t care what you say … I know why my other relationships didn’t work out, ’cause I’m unpredictable.
life is very fragile, and its flow can easily be ruined.
i’m so lost..will i ever find myself?..
Her final entry came on May 30, a month before her death:
“Do not confuse love and desire. Love is the sun, desire – only flash. Desire dazzles, and the sun gives life.
Love does not take away from one in order to give to another. Love – this is the essence of life. But you will not give your life to another.”
On June 28, 2008, at 2:30 p.m., Ruslana fell to her death from the ninth floor balcony of her apartment at 130 Water Street, Manhattan. She left no suicide note.
She had returned from a modelling gig in Paris, and showed no outward signs of distress or abnormality. The doorman noted she was all smiles on the day of her arrival. Friends claim she was “on top of the world,” and had no reason to have done what she did.
Ruslana died four days before her 21st birthday. There were no alcohol or drugs in her system, and in life she was known to hate drinking because it made her sick. Ironically, even though she was afraid of heights, she chose to die by jumping.
She fell from an intimidating height
Before her death, Ruslana’s famously long Rapunzel hair had been hacked off. This spurred on rumours of murder, but it may have been a final act of defiance, or the symptom of a manic and self-destructive episode. As a model, she had to keep herself in pristine condition, always rail-thin, always presentable. It seemed she had had enough.
Although she already had a new boyfriend, luxury car dealer Mark Kaminsky, Ruslana chose to spend her last hours with her ex Artem Perchenok. He was her only real long term relationship: the couple had dated for 2 years.
Artem describes her as impressionable and sensitive: “She would cry for any, even trivial reason. She took everything so personally.” He said that the two were each other’s first loves, which explains why Ruslana spent her last night with him. They also continued to share a cat together.
Artem’s father states that “the kids watched movies, read love poems. My son had this tiny book Ruslana had given him once. They read the poems from there. Later he put the book in her coffin — and his cross.” The film in question was Ghost (1990).
Manhattan crime scene
Hours after Artem dropped Ruslana off at home, she was dead. He felt that she was trying to say goodbye to him. To honor her memory, Artem had a tattoo of Ruslana’s name in Russian done on the inside of his wrist.
At the building, police found that the construction netting on the balcony of Ruslana’s apartment had been sliced open, in order to facilitate her jump. Bizarrely, her body was found 28 feet away from the building. This meant she would have had to have taken a running leap from the balcony.
The sound of her fall to earth startled witnesses, who say the impact sounded like a bomb, a bass drum and a gunshot. Just as she lived, Ruslana died in a very public manner.
Distraught concierge Muhammad Naqib described the grisly scene: “I was shocked when I saw her on the pavement. She was on the road, small and pitiful, in a puddle of blood, surrounded by a crowd. Her arms and neck were broken.” She had no shoes on, and wore only a purple tank top with blue jeans.
Funeral in Moscow
Murder was ruled out, as anyone who went upstairs to Ruslana’s apartment would have had to have crossed paths with the concierge. She had no known enemies who wanted her dead, but some assert she had connections to the Russian underworld. This has never been substantiated
Ruslana’s mother had her buried in Moscow, the city she loved best. At the funeral service, dressed in a black veil, she gave a final touching and heart-wrenching speech about her lost daughter:
“She was very strong, even though she looked so fragile. She was the closest person in the world to me, the most trusted; she would never let me down. I was always proud of her. And I’m proud of her today.”
Until the end, Ruslana supported her family and kept them close to her heart, visiting her mother and brother in Kazakhstan mere months before she died. She kept a small and close circle of friends, which she preferred over the hustle of big parties and Hollywood.
Yet she still felt alone in all the foreign countries she lived in and traveled to, and deprived of the romantic love she always dreamed of. Her online posts show a deep obsession with loss, love and feelings of emptiness. Artem accused her of giving up on herself, and Mark wondered how she could do this when she was loved by so many.
None of us will ever fully understand what motivated Ruslana Korshunova to kill herself, but her pain will continue to resonate deeply with all who read her tragic story.
It was 1930 in sunny Key West, Florida, and Maria de Hoyos was dying of tuberculosis. Victorians described consumption as an illness that heightened the elegance and refinement of its victim, and that it was tragically beautiful to waste away with pallor and fragility. Maria would soon become the object of somebody’s very morbid obsession.
Maria was 21 years old, and the daughter of a Cuban cigar maker, whose life was already marred by tragedy. By all appearances, she was an attractive dark haired beauty queen who often wore red roses in her hair, drawing the attention of strangers who desired to photograph and court her. But death was creeping up close and fast.
Maria’s two sisters would later go on to die of tuberculosis, and her brother-in-law died while trying to save a construction worker from electrocution. Maria was married at the age of 16 to a man named Luis Mesa, who abandoned her after she miscarried their child. She would remain legally married to Luis until her death.
Maria’s life was not going well. And when she fell ill and her mother brought her into Marine Hospital in April of 1930, the disease would prove to be fatal. In the early 1900s, approximately 110,000 Americans would die each year from tuberculosis. The prognosis did not look positive for poor Maria.
Enter Carl Tanzler von Cosel, a German-born radiology technician who worked at the hospital. He was a cultured and intelligent man who had traveled across the world, to countries like Italy, India, Australia, Cuba and the Netherlands.
In fact, he had escaped from an Australian internment camp during WWI by building a makeshift sailboat after secretly studying engineering books. He claimed to have 9 academic degrees (most likely false), and was also purported to have aristocratic blood, going by the title of Count whenever he could get away with it.
Countess Anna
Although he was already married with 2 daughters, Carl was immediately struck by Maria’s appearance. He recognized her from a vision he had many years ago, when his dead ancestor Countess Anna Constantia von Brockdorff came to him in a dream and showed him the face of his true love and soulmate: a gorgeous dark-haired woman who looked exactly like Maria.
The Countess had an interesting story herself; being the mistress of 18th century King Augustus II of Poland. When the King grew tired of the feisty and headstrong Countess, he had her exiled, and she stayed that way for 49 years until her death. Historically, the Cosel family seemed to be haunted by bad luck.
Back to Carl: despite being in his 50s and resembling Sigmund Freud, he did not inhibit himself from making strong advances towards young Maria. He dedicated all his time to curing her, or at least attempting to do so.
The mad scientist at work
Like some medieval wizard, Carl conjured up odd concoctions, potions, tonics, elixirs, and herbs in order to treat her TB. He made house calls to Maria’s home, stealing the hospital’s x-ray machine to monitor her progress. He lavished her with gifts, and professed his undying love, telling her he would love and care for her even if she died.
Unfortunately for Carl, Maria did not reciprocate his romantic feelings, and turned down his proposals of marriage. Carl simply did not care, and continued indulging himself in unrequited love.
On October 25, 1931, Maria finally succumbed to TB, after struggling against the illness for a year and a half, which was how long Carl had spent orbiting her. She was only 22. He was devastated.
Before she died, Carl wrote in his journal how he “had hopes that, despite the extensive damage, the lesions would heal again. I had hopes that, when Elena was out of danger, we would get married. As long as she lived I never abandoned hope.”
The mausoleum, more like a tiny home than a crypt
Sadly, the story does not end here, and it takes a Weekend at Bernie’s sort of twist, but with some added necrophilia. Carl could not get over Maria’s death, so he decided to pursue her from beyond the grave.
With the consent of her family, Carl paid for Maria’s funeral and erected an elaborate mausoleum for her corpse. He had her coffin lined with formaldehyde and other preserving agents, and had a special key made for himself so he could come and go as he pleased. Carl spent hours at Maria’s gravesite everyday, talking to her corpse, singing songs to her, reading stories, and other crazy activities that are best left unspoken. This went on for two years.
Eventually, this was not enough. Carl claimed Maria began talking to him from the other side, telling him she was afraid of decaying and rotting. One night in 1933, he snuck her body out from the mausoleum in a toy wheelbarrow, and took her home with him. Maria’s family soon became puzzled when Carl stopped visiting her grave, but they just assumed that he had finally moved on. Little did they know…
Carl wrote in his memoirs:
“Elena, my darling, we are alone on this shore. He who has given you to me, will not reject our souls, united as they are in His undying love.”
Strong words from a man who was already technically rejected by Maria several times. Now that she was dead, she could not protest. Her body belonged to him. At home with her corpse, Carl set to work repairing the damage done by decomposition.
He replaced Maria’s brittle broken bones with coat hanger wire, and stuffed her torso with rags to keep her body in its original shape. He inserted glass eyes into her orbitals, and replaced her rotting skin with silk cloth coated by plaster of paris and wax.
For some reason, Maria’s mother possessed a wig made out of her daughter’s hair, and she gifted this to Carl. He would use this wig on Maria’s corpse, as the decomposition process had caused her hair to fall out.
Carl had to continuously preserve Maria’s decaying body, and mummification isn’t easy. He constantly applied disinfectants, deodorizer and formaldehyde to counteract the smells of putrefaction.
Maria’s corpse after the creepy makeover
Now the big necrophilia question arises: did he or didn’t he? Surprisingly, there are no contemporary sources that mention anything about necrophilia. All of the sources that make claims about this are modern. In 1972, two doctors who were present at Maria’s 1940 autopsy recalled how Carl had inserted a paper tube into the corpse’s vaginal canal to facilitate intercourse. There are no photographs or other sources to prove this.
In Carl’s autobiography, he does confess to kissing and cuddling Maria’s cadaver. He slept with the body in his bed, but he kept a curtain between them because he was an extreme gentleman. It isn’t very far off to believe that necrophilia played a part in this twisted romance, but it’s important to remember these claims are not fully proven.
At this point, Carl had lost his job at the hospital and was living in a remote shack which also housed his laboratory. His behaviour became too erratic to hold a job, and the hospital had found out he was stealing medical equipment from them.
Carl had basically abandoned his wife and children, and was more content living with a dead body than a live woman. For some reason, his wife Doris took pity on him and regularly mailed him money to help him survive his destitute situation.
The peculiar lab shack
He was seen shopping for women’s clothing, jewelry and perfumes, and everybody assumed Carl was seeing someone new and had finally moved on. Nosy neighbours who peered through Carl’s window saw him dancing with the figure of a woman, and some thought it was a large doll. However, he managed to keep Maria’s body in his home for seven years without being discovered.
In 1940, it was finally over. Maria’s sister heard weird rumours about Carl. She went over to his home to confront him, and found out his terrible secret. She reported him to the police, and Carl was arrested. He was charged with “wantonly and maliciously destroying a grave and removing a body without authorization,”but the statute of limitations saved him from prosecution.
Surprisingly, a psychiatric evaluation by the court found Carl to be mentally competent. That seems extremely dubious.
As if this case wasn’t already bizarre enough, it takes an added sci-fi turn. Authorities found a homemade spaceship outside of Carl’s lab. Being a radiology technician, he of course had to go full mad scientist and attempt to go “high into the stratosphere, so that radiation from outer space could penetrate Elena’s tissues and restore life to her somnolent form.” Is necrophilia legal in outer space?
The homemade spacecraft
The jig was up, and authorities confiscated the corpse. Carl had the nerve to ask them to return it back to him, but his request was rejected.
Instead, Maria’s mummified remains were put on display at Dean-Lopez Funeral Home. The case was now the center of a media circus, and 6,800 spectators came to gawk at the macabre spectacle, paying $1 each for the privilege. After this, Maria was finally laid to rest at Key West Cemetery in an unmarked grave, to deter Carl from disturbing her eternal rest.
Oddly enough, the public found Carl to be a sympathetic figure; a tragic romantic who had lost his beloved to cruel fate. They either ignored or were unaware of the necrophilic aspects of the “relationship.”
An egregious display
A defeated Carl shuffled off to Pasco County, Florida to patch together some semblance of a life. Before leaving, he dynamite bombed the mausoleum he had created for Maria, to spite authorities.
Not surprisingly, he was still obsessed. He created a life-like effigy and mask of her face, to replace the confiscated cadaver. He wrote his autobiography in 1947, and received American citizenship in 1950, because what’s more American than defiling a dead body? Doris continued to support her deranged and estranged husband financially.
Carl died alone in 1952, at the age of 75. His body was not discovered until three weeks after his death. Ironically, the man who prevented Maria from decomposing was himself rotting alone on the floor of his home for several weeks.
Carl holds a death mask of Maria
For his final diary entry, Carl had written:
“Human jealousy has robbed me of the body of my Elena, yet divine happiness is flowing through me for she has survived death. Forever and ever, she is with me.”
Standing above him as he died was a wax figure of Maria. From 1930 to 1952, he had endlessly obsessed over this woman. For nearly 22 years, she had been the focus of his life, alive or dead. To some, it is the ultimate romance, and to others, it is a grotesque tale of violation.
Maria Elena lies in some unmarked Floridian grave, in an 18 inch casket. The former corpse bride is now at rest.
It was the summer of 1999, and 15-year old Sharmini Anandavel needed to earn some quick cash to buy a middle school graduation outfit. Her family had immigrated from Sri Lanka to Toronto, Canada a few years back, and had a hard time supporting themselves as her parents barely spoke any English. Sharmini took it upon herself to raise money to buy a fancy dress and shoes.
She told her parents she had found a job answering phones in an office. But to her friends, she claimed she was to be employed as an undercover drug operative. Her parents had offered to give her a ride to work that day, but Sharmini had refused. She was hiding something.
Sharmini never returned from work that day. 4 months later, her skeletonized remains were found by a hiking father and son in a ravine by a river, carelessly tossed into a shallow grave. Her body had decomposed from the summer heat, and had been ravaged by coyotes who lived in a den nearby.
Sharmini was identified from her dental records, since there was nothing but a skull and bone fragments left as evidence. Investigators also found hair and fingernails that were painted blue, just as Sharmini had done before disappearing.
Her classmates and teachers were shocked. She was described by everyone as a vivacious, outgoing and often mouthy girl, who would never hesitate to stand up for herself. The boy sitting next to Sharmini was crushing on her, and teachers were often bemused by her witty sense of humour. How could she vanish without a trace, on the way to some obtuse job offer?
In Sharmini’s apartment complex, there lived a man named Stanley Tippett, a troubled individual with severe facial deformities caused by Treacher-Collins syndrome, and a criminal rap sheet longer than a novel.
Stanley was 23 at the time, and married with children. He did however have a creepy roving eye, and pretended to be a police officer so he could lure children in the complex to go swimming and on drives with him. In reality, he was a bum who struggled to gain employment and took his rage out on the rest of the world.
He stalked several women throughout his life, once offering a fake job to a woman at a Wal-Mart fair, then proceeding to visit her house repeatedly to leave her gifts. Stanley once kidnapped a 12 year old girl, who was luckily saved when bystanders heard her scream. He had even kidnapped a woman from a bus stop with a fake gun, pressing it to her head and only relenting when she lied to him that she had HIV and was on her period.
Witnesses claim to have seen Stanley around Sharmini at the apartment before her disappearance, and police believe he had made a false job offer to her, pretending to be an officer who would pay her to go undercover. Police found a job application in her bedroom which looked scam-like, but Sharmini was naive and accepted it in good faith. Stanley had probably advised her to keep the fake police job a secret, but Sharmini had told her friends, though she didn’t mention his name.
That Saturday June 12 morning sealed Sharmini’s fate. Stanley had most likely lured her to a remote location, and assaulted and killed the innocent teenager who was merely looking for a job to buy herself a beautiful dress.
Stanley currently rots in jail for other sexual assault related offenses, but refuses to confess to Sharmini’s murder, and detectives do not have any concrete evidence to tie him to her death either. All that exists is circumstantial evidence, which is inadmissible in court.
How and why Sharmini died remains a mystery. All we know is that she was taken advantage of by a disturbed human being, and that her tragic story serves as a warning to never trust anyone.
In the early morning hours of Feb 3, 1982, a young girl with a toothache showed up at an old truck stop in the midst of a dusty Arizona desert. She was blonde, youthful, and beautiful; catching the eye of everyone around her. And she would soon be dead.
She was nicknamed Valentine Sally, after the day her body was discovered. But there was nothing romantic about her death.
On Feb 2, a university student claimed to have picked up a hitchhiking girl who matched her description. The girl was troubled and was escaping from a discordant family situation. She lived with friends and had the unfortunate profession of dishwasher, and was looking to hitchhike all the way to New Jersey. Sad to say, she wouldn’t make it.
That fateful morning at the truck stop was when she was last seen alive, and was most likely where she met her killer. Waitress Patty Wilkins said of her:
″She was a blonde, a pretty girl. I assumed she was about 16 or 17 years old. We’ve been in this little truck stop for 17 years and as a rule when a girl comes in off a truck and looks too young, we pull her off, the sheriff’s office comes along and they send her home.″
The old man wore a cowboy hat with a peacock feather on it
But this time, Patty would not report the teenage runaway to the sheriff. That’s because the girl was accompanied by a concerned old man in his 60s, dressed head to toe in cowboy gear. Some sources even claim she was accompanied by two men, and witnesses in the truck stop say they appeared almost familial.
The girl was in pain because her lower molar had been drilled for a root canal, and her mouth hurt too much to eat any food. She asked for aspirin instead. Whoever she was, this girl was definitely a homeless hitchhiker suffering something awful.
However, she was wearing a nice pair of designer jeans, as well as a candy-cane striped red and white sweater. She was around 5’5 and 120 lbs, a healthy weight for her size. The girl wore a 36C bra, had her ears pierced, and had a white handkerchief with her. To outsiders, she appeared well taken care of. She didn’t appear disheveled or poor, and could somehow afford dental care.
There were several scars on her feet and thighs, indicating either clumsiness or abuse.
The cozy pinstripe sweater
On Valentine’s Day, 11 days after she was seen at the truck stop, the girl was found dead near Interstate 40. There had been an accident by the highway, and authorities were looking for blown out car parts. Instead they saw a strawberry-blonde head face down in the sand.
Upon turning the body over, police discovered that most of her face had been eaten away by animals, as she had lain decomposing for almost 2 weeks in the arid and humid desert. Some animal had torn off and made away with her right ear.
She was lying under a cedar tree, about 25 ft from the main road. Her belt loops were nearly torn and her sweater pulled over her head, as her killer had dragged her corpse off of a truck by her clothes and flung her onto the ground.
The girl’s cause of death is unknown, but authorities suspect suffocation. Thankfully, she had not been sexually assaulted.
A rather creepy 1982 sketch of Valentine Sally
Police were unable to solve this perplexing case. They never found the creepy old truck driver(s) who accompanied Valentine Sally to the diner, and most assume that he was the killer and had gotten away with it. The 1970s and 1980s were an era of impunity for long-distance truck drivers who killed naive hitchhikers.
In 1984, Valentine Sally was misidentified as Melody Cutlip, a Floridian runaway, thanks to a moronic odontologist literally named Homer. Melody’s mother rejected the identification. Call it a mother’s intuition.
Homer mismatched the teeth of the two girls, and Melody returned to her parents’ home in 1986 alive and well, proving him wrong. Tragically, Melody would die in 1998 in a car accident, cutting her action-packed life short.
Valentine Sally lies in a grave wrongly marked “Melody Cutlip,” over 30 years after the world realized that was not even her. The only person that comes out of this ordeal with some humanity is the waitress Patty Wilkins, who last saw the blonde girl with the toothache alive.
Patty paid $168 in 1984 to have Valentine Sally buried in a decent grave. Adjusted for inflation, that is over $400. And that was on a truck stop waitress’ salary. Perhaps she felt haunted by the girl who left her diner, only to lose her life as well.
They call her the female Jeffrey Dahmer. The femme fatale Hannibal Lecter. Those are some pretty big shoes to fill, but she’s a worthy candidate.
23 year old petite, barely 5 ft tall, olive-skinned beauty Omaima Aree Nelson shocked the world when she was discovered to have murdered, dismembered, and possibly even cannibalized her glorified sugar daddy of a husband, 56 year old William “Bill” Nelson.
Bill was a large man at 6’4 and 230 lbs. He was a former pilot, dishonored after he was convicted of smuggling marijuana in Texas and electronics to Mexico, and served hard time for it in federal prison. He managed to get out and rebuild his life by attaining a job at a mortgage company.
Omaima on Bill’s little red Corvette, soon to store his body parts
Omaima was an Egyptian immigrant who had arrived in the U.S.A. at the age of 18, after a tough and horrible early life in Cairo. Her family made her undergo female genital mutilation during her childhood, which made sex unbearable and uncomfortable for Omaima in later life.
She tried her hand at modelling gigs and worked as a nanny for a time, but most of all, she was looking for a consistent sugar daddy. She had been with several wealthy older men, but nothing had come out of it.
Until she met Bill at a California bar. The pair played pool together, and something clicked. She had found a sugar daddy, and he had found a kept woman. They married after a whirlwind courtship which lasted not more than a few weeks. It would be the worst decision of both their lives.
The unhappy couple
Bill’s manager would describe the couple as “real quiet, mysterious people” who were married way too soon. Bill’s daughter was disgusted her father married such a young woman, and refused to interact with the pair.
Omaima claimed that Bill began beating and raping her soon after marrying, and he would tell her that “I paid for you, I’m getting what I paid for.” She even claimed he had thrown her kitten out of a moving car. However, Omaima had previously been arrested for assaulting an ex with a gun after tying him up, and then demanding money from him at gunpoint. Who was to be believed?
On Thanksgiving day in 1991, Omaima decided that Bill’s time was up. They had been married for barely a month.
According to Omaima, she asserted that Bill had tried to rape her again that night, and she was forced to kill him in self defense. The autopsy found that Bill’s feet were bound during the murder, and Omaima had a history of performing bondage on her sugar daddies. It seemed unlikely that she would have been able to subdue such a large man, had he not been bound.
The prosecution argued that she had tied him up, fooling Bill into believing the bondage was part of a sex game, then brutally murdered him in cold blood while he lay helplessly bound.
The lamp used as a bludgeoning tool
The details of the murder are gruesome: he was struck in the head with a lamp, causing blunt force trauma. He was then stabbed with scissors, and beaten with a clothes iron. It is unclear when in the attack he died, but it must have been excruciatingly painful. The Costa Mesa apartment was completely drenched in blood.
As if the murder wasn’t extreme enough, Omaima then proceeded to dismember her dead husband. She decapitated him, cooked his head, and put it in the freezer. She cut off his hands and boiled them in hot oil to remove traceable fingerprints. Bill was also castrated, as revenge for the alleged sexual assaults, and his lower body, legs, and torso were skinned with a knife.
The bloodied mattress Bill was killed on
Omaima wrapped Bill’s remains in newspaper and foil, and put them in garbage bags in their trash can, mixing them with Thanksgiving turkey leftovers. She put sections of the corpse in the garbage disposal chute, and neighbours heard the machine grinding his body parts for 48 hrs after the murder. They “heard the garbage disposal go on for a long time . . . and constant chopping sounds.”
The next day, Omaima drove around in Bill’s 1975 red Corvette, asking friends and exes to help her dispose of Bill’s plentiful remains, which lay in the back seat of her trunk. She even offered a pal $75k for assistance. The friend wasn’t having any of it, and called the cops immediately. Omaima would watch calmly as the police removed bags filled with bloody pieces of corpse from the vehicle.
When police raided their apartment, they found “suitcases and plastic bags soaked with dark liquid from his body parts,” and “in the fry cooker there sat Mr. Nelson’s hands, and when we opened the refrigerator there was Mr. Nelson’s head with stab wounds.” Coincidentally, police had also found severed heads in Jeffrey Dahmer’s fridge earlier that year, in July of 1991.
Refrigerated severed head, anyone?
Omaima managed to successfully dispose of 130 lbs of Bill’s body, and authorities were never able to find the missing body parts.
In court, there began a sensational trial. The most startling accusation of all is that Omaima cannibalized Bill’s remains. According to the psychiatrist who interviewed her in jail, Omaima had donned red lipstick, a red hat, and red high heels before she set out to dismember the corpse.
Omaima would deny it later on, but she told the psychiatrist that she had cooked Bill’s ribs and eaten them with barbecue sauce. She had enjoyed cooking him and said she “did his ribs just like in a restaurant.” While sitting at a table and consuming his remains, Omaima talked aloud to herself, saying “it’s so sweet, it’s so delicious. . . . I like mine tender.” At least she enjoyed the meal.
The psychiatrist said he had never seen anyone “so bizarre, so psychotic” in 20 years of medical practice, and said that her early years of abuse and genital mutilation in Egypt had left her mentally unhinged and plagued by PTSD and anger.
At the trial, she argued in her defense; “If I didn’t defend my life, I would have been dead. I’m sorry it happened, but I’m glad I lived. I’m sorry I dismembered him. I swear to God I did not eat any part of him. I am not a monster.”
In an extremely odd defense of his client, Omaima’s lawyer argued that she had dismembered Bill according to Ancient Egyptian tradition, fearing her husband would haunt her in the afterlife. In the myth of Osiris, his traitorous brother Set drowns him, then cuts him into 14 pieces and scatters his body across Egypt. Osiris’ wife Isis travels through Egypt and finds every body part, then puts him back together. With the exception of his phallus, which was devoured by fish in the Nile. Jurors did not buy this religious background story as adequate defense.
Omaima was convicted of second degree murder. Some jurors believed her tales of abuse, and others felt she was lying. After seeing images of the butchered corpse, a traumatized juror said, “All I want to do right now is go home and go to bed. You had to see the pictures (of the victim). The pictures were bad enough.”
Omaima is still in prison, and has been denied parole at every chance. She says she has turned a new leaf, but ironically enough, she found a new sugar daddy while in jail. The man was in his 70s, and is now deceased. She said of him; “We had three-day conjugal visits. There were knives in the kitchen. He never felt threatened or endangered in any way. I loved him so much.” Whoever this man was, he certainly was brave.
Asha Degree was a nine-year old girl who went missing from her North Carolina home on Feb 14, 2000, and was never heard from again.
The case is startling for many reasons, the most disturbing aspect of it being that she appears to have willingly left her bedroom on a rainy night around 3 AM to go outside for a yet to be explained cause.
Asha had packed her black bookbag and Tweety purse with several items before leaving home, including a few pairs of shirts, overalls, jeans, her basketball uniform, a pair of shoes, her wallet, family photos and a house key. Where was a 9-year old girl going with these items in the middle of the night? The lack of answers is puzzling.
Around 4 AM, two separate drivers saw a little girl in white shirt and pants walking down Highway 18. One of the motorists became concerned how “strange [it was that] such a small child would be out by herself at that hour,” especially due to the fact there was a heavy pouring rainstorm that night. The driver tried to pull over to help the girl, but Asha seemed to have been upset by this and ran deep into the woods to avoid him.
When her parents awoke the next morning around 6 am, it was Valentine’s day and the couple’s anniversary. They found their daughter had disappeared without a trace.
This was a shock to them as Asha was a shy, reserved girl who was afraid of dogs and never acted wildly or unpredictably. By all accounts, her family was strict and disallowed computers in the home, and always made sure their kids did their homework on time. Asha was on her 4th grade basketball team, and had cried about losing a game a few days before her disappearance.
Police performed a search all over Asha’s neighbourhood the very same morning, but could not find anything until Feb 15, during which they discovered candy wrappers, a pencil, a marker and a Mickey Mouse hair bow in a shed close to the highway Asha had been seen walking down.
Aged composite of Asha in her 20s
No other evidence was discovered until a year later in 2001, when Asha’s bookbag was dug up during construction work near Highway 18. The bag was wrapped in plastic, and had Asha’s name and phone number inside it. The FBI went on to DNA test the bag, but the results were kept secret. No evidence of Asha was ever found after this, though police did say she may have been seen getting into a green 1970s Lincoln or Ford on the night of her highway excursion.
The discovery of Asha’s buried backpack from the highway construction site was a bad sign, proof to many that someone had killed her. There are many theories about what happened to her, but few answers.
Some say Asha had left the home to prepare a Valentine’s + anniversary surprise for her parents. Some say her parents had done something to cause her to run away, or were involved in a more unnerving manner. Others believe a predator in Asha’s life lured her outside somehow, then kidnapped and killed her. Asha could have been a victim of a hit and run, with the rain washing away any evidence of her death on the highway. Or even more skin-crawling, somebody could have picked the girl up off of the road and kidnapped her that night.
There is no closure as of yet, but this is one of the most mysterious and frightening unsolved disappearance cases in recent American history. There must have been something deeply wrong in her life for a girl so young to go off alone on a stormy night without telling anyone, and then to vanish with no explanation. Wherever Asha may be, and to whomever may have abducted her, one can only say this: Her disappearance will never be forgotten.
The “Lime Lady” is an unidentified murder victim found in Jones, Oklahoma in April of 1980. She was discovered naked on the shore of the North Canadian river and died by 3 gunshot wounds to the chest. She was approx. 18-25 yo, and slender at 5′7 and 115 lbs. Her face and chest were freckled.
She was nicknamed after the quicklime her killer had tried to use to enhance her decomposition, but it had the opposite effect and due to the river’s moisture, she was almost mummified. She was clothed when she was murdered, her killer having stripped her nude after death.
A creepy composite sculpture
Her arms showed evidence that someone had dragged her to the river to kill her, and her killer appeared to have been walking towards her when shooting her. The force of one bullet had embedded a dime in her chest.
Said police chief Bob Green; “We have never been able to identify this girl for all this time. I believe she was dumped there and that this was the second crime scene. She was killed elsewhere.”
The 1cm heart tattoo above her left breast
The only unique identifiers on her were an appendectomy scar and a heart-shaped tattoo on her chest. She has been unidentified for nearly 40 years. Police suspect she may have been killed by a biker gang, or was a runaway from a foster home, but nothing has ever been confirmed. The Lime Lady’s life and end remain an unsolved mystery.
Update:
As of Jan. 30, 2020, The Lime Lady has finally been identified as U.S. military soldier Tamara Lee Tigard!
40 years after her death, DNA Doe Project solved the mystery by uploading her file to their database, using samples of blood, oral swabs, and dental x-rays to make their conclusion.
Tamara was born in California in 1959, and was killed before her 21st birthday. She held an SPC (Specialist) rank in the army. On Feb. 24, 1979 in Nevada, she married a Chadwick Ryan Carr; a man with an extensive criminal record. They divorced mere months later. He is still alive and in his 60s.
Oddly, she was living in Las Vegas at the time at the time of her death. Tamara disappeared without a trace after leaving her home to go for a walk.
How did she end up dead over 1000 miles away in Oklahoma? This question is yet to be answered. There was a 4 week window between her disappearance and the discovery of her body near the North Canadian river.
Tamara’s police case was closed long ago after a woman falsely used her identity in Ohio. The identity of this woman is now unknown, as well as the extent of her involvement in Tamara’s murder. Police do, however, have a photo of the identity thief and are working on finding her.
Unfortunately, all of Tamara’s immediate family members are now deceased. The only people that could be notified of her body’s discovery were second cousins. Sadly, her parents died without ever knowing what happened to their daughter.
Tamara’s killer is still yet to be found. Let us hope the killer is uncovered and that she receives posthumous justice!
It was October. 7, 1949, and 26-year old actress and model Jean Spangler was living out her last known day on earth. After this, she would vanish like a mirage, without a trace. She left behind a mystery more tangled than a film noir plot.
Jean asked her sister-in-law Sophie to babysit her five-year old daughter while she went out that evening. It was 5 pm in autumn L.A., and the sun was setting on the city of dreams. Where was Jean going?
Jean claimed she was meeting her ex-husband Dexter Benner, to discuss an increase in child support payments. One can imagine he wasn’t too happy with that. Their marriage had ended in a messy divorce three years earlier, with a dramatic custody battle in which Dexter declared Jean an “unfit mother,” and threatened to take her daughter away from her forever.
Jean cries during her 1948 custody battle
She was known to be a party girl who ran in a rough crowd of mobsters, wannabe bit-part players, and Hollywood B-list stars. Jean was like a slightly more successful Elizabeth Short, although they both shared the same jet-black hair, sea-blue eyes and ambition for stardom. And they would both have their lives snuffed out much too early.
Before Jean’s disappearance, actor and friend Robert Cummings had claimed she had told him “I have a new romance,” and when asked if it was serious, she had said “Not really, but I’m having the time of my life.” Jean was known to be terrible at choosing men, as every relationship she had would end in financial, legal or physically violent disaster.
Later on, stumped detectives would complain how “The only thing we’ve been able to find out, is that this girl really got around.”
Even more troubling, Jean was believed to be three months pregnant before she vanished. And she was not ready to deal with another child. Her friends had claimed she was searching for a doctor to perform a back-alley abortion, as the procedure was illegal at the time.
The troubled girl originally from grim Seattle, who wormed her way into glamorous L.A. and Hollywood supporting roles, could not steer clear of dangerous men. There would be far too many suspects in this case, and far too few answers.
Two hours after Jean left home that cool autumn evening, she phoned Sophie and let her know she would be coming home late because she was filming on a movie set. Later on into the investigation, the Screen Extra’s Guild would inform police that they had found no evidence she was working that night.
The last confirmed appearance of Jean was at a farmer’s market near her home at 6 pm. An employee said Jean appeared to be waiting for someone. Her whereabouts afterwards remain a mystery.
Sophie grew alarmed when Jean didn’t return home the next morning, and reported her disappearance to the police.
Jean’s discarded purse was soon found in a park 9 km from her home, with the straps nearly torn off, indicating some sort of violent force. Her body would never be found, and she seemed to have vanished into thin air.
The purse with the broken straps
In her purse was a cryptic note:
“Kirk: Can’t wait any longer, Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away.”
Police took this to mean that Jean was aborting the baby of a man named Kirk, and Dr. Scott was the abortionist she had snuck away to see that night. Or it was a bizarre Star Trek reference.
Her mother had gone away to visit family in Kentucky at the time, but other family members were still present at the home. It seemed absurd to think that she would’ve been able to hide a bloody and messy illicit abortion from her mother, daughter, sister-in-law, and brother.
The theories of what happened to disappearing Jean are as follows:
No# 1. The killer was Kirk Douglas, alleged to have a mean streak towards women (read about his supposed rape of Natalie Wood). Jean had a bit part in Young Man with a Horn, a corny 1950 musical starring Kirk, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, and Hoagy Carmichael. She was on her way up, climbing the map of stars, but somebody would tear her down.
Kirk claimed to not have known Jean, then later recanted that they had talked a bit on set. Jean’s mother claimed a man named Kirk had once picked her daughter up from home, but had chosen to wait in his car rather than come inside. Many claim the coincidence in name was too odd to be true, as how many women out there get down with a Kirk? Perhaps they had a secret affair, and things went sour when he found out she was pregnant.
Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall on the set of Young Man with a Horn
2. Ex-husband Dexter Benner and his new wife Lynn had killed Jean due to her requesting more ample child support payments, and for being a hindrance in general for the couple. Lynn was supposed to be a friend of mobster Mickey Cohen, and Dex was still bitter about having lost custody of his daughter. This makes for a toxic formula.
Jean had also cheated on Dexter with a man named Scotty during their marriage, which caused the couple to divorce. Dex could have been holding a humiliation and rage-fueled grudge for this, and finally exploded in violence. However, Lynn covered for Dexter and gave him an alibi, saying they were together when Jean’s disappearance occurred.
3. Scotty, the man Jean had an affair with. Like in the plot of From Here to Eternity, Jean had met Scotty while her husband was stationed in the army in the South Pacific.
Spurned ex-husband Dexter Benner
He was said to be a tall and handsome air corps lieutenant, who was much better at giving her a good time than her stuffy manufacturer businessman husband. Jean seemed to have only married Dexter for the financial stability he had given her, and looked for excitement outside of the marriage.
The tropical romance with Scotty had turned violent, and he eventually beat Jean and gave her a black eye. Scotty threatened to kill her if she ever left him. This was the last straw for Jean, and she ended the affair. Scotty’s lawyer claimed they hadn’t spoken since 1945. Some suspect the “Scott” in the note is damning evidence, but the lieutenant was nowhere close to being a doctor.
4. The suspicious “Dr. Scott” mentioned in the letter was an abortionist Jean had gone to see that night. The risky procedure went wrong, and Jean had died, causing the doctor to panic and dump her body somewhere secret. The police were never able to find this elusive suspect, or any other abortionist or doctor who they could link to Jean.
The infamous note
5. Mobsters had killed Jean. She was romantically linked to gangster Davy Ogul, who himself disappeared two days after Jean had. He was the henchman of mob boss Mickey Cohen, ironically also a friend of her ex-husband’s wife. Some say he had turned against his former boss, and planned to testify against him in court. Months after Jean’s disappearance, a hotel clerk would claim she saw her in the company of Davy and other mob men in Texas.
Despite all these leads, police could not piece together any coherent resolution. The case was more muddled than a Raymond Chandler noir novel, and even worse, no more physical evidence was found after the discovery of Jean’s purse and the brief note.
Police search for Jean’s remains at Griffith Park
Dexter gained custody of the couple’s daughter Christine after his wife’s vanishing, though Jean’s mother attempted to gain visitation rights. Defying court orders, Dexter and Lynn took the girl to Florida and never returned.
As for Jean’s mother, she said about her daughter “I’m sure she would have communicated with us if she was alive and free. And nobody can tell me she’d have left her baby unless she was forced to.”
Mother Florence mourns her daughter
The case went stone cold, and no more useful evidence was discovered after 1950. Some even claim she was murdered by the same unknown killer who had taken the life of the Black Dahlia a few years earlier. The dark-haired beauties remain symbols of lost dreams in the nightmarish and crime-filled landscapes of 1940s L.A.
Jean was the prototypical Old Hollywood starlet searching for fame and fortune on the silver screen, but instead she sunk down into the harrowing and hellish depths of tinseltown, and was mostly likely kidnapped, murdered, and disposed of by a cruel individual. And so what else could have been said by 1949 newspapers other than this: Jean Spangler has vanished and we will never see her beautiful black and white silhouette onscreen as a lead.
Jean’s five year-old daughter Christine would never see her mom again
La Pascualita is a beautiful hyper realistic 1930s bridal mannequin on display in a shop in Chihuahua, Mexico.
Visitors are often surprised at how genuinely human she looks, as she has visible veins on her legs, thick dark textured eyelashes, soft skin with pores, extremely intricate hands and nails, and a penetrating, strange gaze that spooks passerbys.
She is believed to be the mummified corpse of a bride who died of a black widow spider bite on her wedding day in 1930. She was then supposedly embalmed and put on display by her mother, Pascuala Esparza, who owned the bridal shop.
There are some very outrageous and fairy-tale like stories about La Pascualita. Rumor has it that a French magician once fell in love with her, and cast a spell to make her come back to life so he could take her out for a night on the town, like some phantasmic Cinderella.
Employee Sonia Burciaga said that “Every time I go near Pascualita my hands break out in a sweat. Her hands are very realistic and she even has varicose veins on her legs. I believe she’s a real person.”
Others have also claimed the alleged corpse bride’s eyes follow them around and that she moves positions through the shop at night. For now, we have no way of knowing whether La Pascualita is made of wax or flesh. But she is, quite literally, a mannequin with a life of her own.
lost girl's blog 