Farmville is a sleepy little town about sixty miles west of Richmond, Virginia. It is a college town hosting Longwood University and the second oldest college in the country, Hampden-Sydney, just down the road. It's the kind of place where, as the saying goes, "nothing ever happens." Until something did. In September of 2009, the town became the site of the four brutal murders of a local college professor, a local church minister, and two beautiful teenage girls.

Local police were initially baffled as the residents of Farmville were horrified. It was discovered that the murderer was Samuel Richard McCroskey, a teenaged boy from California, who had been visitng his online girlfriend in Virginia. Several factors caused the young man's troubled mind to go completed unhinged, such as a devastating rejection and a haunting concert by one of America's Horrorcore bands.

The Farmville murders were ferocious. Official visitors to the crime scene referred to the setting as that of "a slaughterhouse." The press quickly dubbed it as the case of the Horrorcore Murders, or the Juggalo Murders, since the young couple identified with the Horrorcore rap subculture ("Juggalo" is the label given to fans of Psychopathic Records hip hop groups). Some were quick to blame the music and the performers because of the history of violent Juggalo attacks. While music of all genres can serve as inspirations both good and bad, in this case, the real evil clearly lay in the heart and mind of Richard McCroskey. 

Emma and her mother picked up McCroskey from the Richmond airport. The teens were both giddy with nerves and excited at the prospect of meeting for the first time in-person. But right away, things didn't seem to be quite right. McCroskey was open, his heart on his sleeve, his vulnerable, needy self revealed to the young woman whom he was convinced would love and protect him. It probably wouldn't have mattered what she looked like, or talked like, or said - he remained smitten.

Such was not the case with Emma. She pulled back and became mostly aloof right after the two met. She apparently confided later with her friend, Melanie, that McCroskey was not nearly as cool and tough as he'd portrayed himself online. She also did not seem to find him as attractive as she'd expected. The rejection must have been shocking to McCroskey. He'd built up such unrealistic expectations, had arrived so needy, and now he was stuck a long way from home with two girls who giggled and taunted him just out of earshot. And they still hadn't left for the Michigan concert. 

Though it remains only a rumor and a story told by some of the concert's attendees, Emma may have had sex with one of the Horrorcore performers at an after-party. What is certain is that she spent her time at the event flirting with other men and studiously avoided McCroskey, who mostly stood to the side. Looking back, it may well be that his already troubled mind began to turn murderous at the concert. 

18-year-old Melanie Wells was born and raised in Louisville, KY, but had moved with her family to West Virginia when she was in high school. The family had taken the decision to allow Melanie to complete her high school diploma at home, since the move was a major adjustment for her. Described as a sweet and friendly girl who loved music, Melanie met Emma Niederbrock online and the two became good friends, sharing an interest in all things Horrorcore. When Emma knew she'd be going to the concert in Michigan, she invited Melanie to join the group. Melanie really was an innocent bystander, and McCroskey took no pity on her.

Following the murders, Melanie's parents became concerned when their daughter did not return home and could not be reached online or by phone. They made calls to the Niederbrock-Kelly household, but to no avail. McCroskey left voice mail messages on Melanie's mother's phone, but this only made the Wells family more suspicious. Her father actually drove to Farmville to check to see what was happening, but no one answered the door. Finally, Melanie's parents contacted Emma's father, Mark Niederbrock, who told the worried couple he would check in at the Farmville house the next day. 

Performers, members, and fans of the Horrorcore and Juggalo subcultures were quick to respond to news stories that attempted to blame the horrific Farmville murders on their shows and music. McCroskey's parents and even victim Emma Niederbrock's parents had expressed concerns over the violence in their children's favorite new music. Emma and her mother, Debra, a sociology professor and also McCroskey's victim, had entered counseling over Emma's obsession with the blood and death lyrics associated with Horrorcore rap.

Supporters of the musical subgenre argued that their music was only that of a dark fantasy and that no sane performer or fan would actually enact the terrifying scenarios portrayed in the songs. 

Not that every person who enjoys or is involved with the so-called "horrorcore" rap scene (where performers rap about death, murder, and other atrocities) is a disaffected youth with low esteem, but Richard McCroskey certainly fits that profile. Described by his sister as a meek and humble boy with low self-esteem, McCroskey seemed to have become involved with the tough-looking, tough-sounding Horrorcore and Juggalo subculture as an attempt to project his own tough image. One might say he wore the persona and the gear as a type of armor, to protect him from a world that he felt misjudged and humiliated him.

He also appears to have lived in something of an online fantasy world, where he could project himself as a mean, tough rap artist. He clearly sought to present an image of a strong, confident, "in control" sort of guy. Some of his musical efforts remain online today, serving as reminders of how an online persona can prove to be fake and disastrous.

Emma Niederbrock was described as a beautiful, sweet, and smart young woman who left public schools during middle school in order to be educated at home. She dreamed of becoming a fashion designer and was fond of modeling her creations to her family. She fancied herself something of a Goth, wore black, dyed her hair bright pink, and took up the nickname, "Rag Doll." She was active in the online Horrorcore websites and discussion forums, and posted regularly on her MySpace account. Some of the last messages she posted were in anticipation of McCroskey's arrival. Their shared excitement is palpable and tragic, in light of the murderous rage that followed.

It's normal for people meet online in modern society. That's exactly how Emma and McCroskey met and "fell in love." The two "dated" online for more than a year before they met. They had pet names and cutesy, private catch phrases known only to one another. He loved it that she looked up to him as a tough Horrorcore rapper; he thought she was smart and beautiful. McCroskey seems to have made her into a paragon, not only of perfection, but of devotion, all for him. She, to his mind, was someone who would never let him down. Misplaced expectations would lead to heartbreak and murder.

Since the case never went to trial, any evidence of how McCroskey spent his time with the rotting corpses has not been revealed. Rumors abound that police had photos and videos in their custody of how the murderer desecrated the bodies. He may also have performed rap songs and recorded those in the presence of the dead. What is known is that his already fragile mental state deteriorated during the days and nights he spent watching and smelling the death around him. 

If taxi driver Curtis Gibson knew what he was in for, he probably would not have picked up Richard McCroskey. To put it bluntly, a horrendous odor emanated from McCroskey's body. Gibson described the odor as "foul," and he had to drive the taxi with the windows down to keep from gagging. Others who encountered McCroskey during his escape attempt expressed similar sentiments, including a statement that the odor was akin to that of "rotting flesh." Apparently, the killer had neither bathed nor changed his clothes since the night of the murders several days earlier. His clothes were described by witnesses as caked in gore. 

McCroskey remained with the corpses for days in the two-story home that was blocks from Longwood University. On the third day, he committed the fourth and final murder in his one-man killing spree. Rev. Mark Niederbrock, Emma's father and Debra's estranged husband, dropped by the house on his way to a meeting in Richmond. He'd been asked by Melanie Wells' family and others to try to find out why no one had heard from the three women.

McCroskey met him at the door. It is unclear if anything was said before the youth began his attack on the Presbyterian minister. What is known is that Mark tried to defend himself against the blows of the sledge hammer, but he was soon on the floor, where McCroskey delivered blows to the head similar to those of the other victims. The attack was so ferocious that the hardwood flooring beneath Niederbrock was damaged and soaked through with blood. Shortly after the final murder, McCroskey stole the reverend's car and attempted to make his way to the Richmond airport.

Jilted teen lover and would-be "horrorcore" rap artist, Richard "Syko Sam" McCroskey, found himself stuck in a small Virginia town in a house with the girl who had just rejected him, one of her friends, and her mother. It was several days before he was due to fly back to his home in California, and he even dreaded that since he'd left home bragging of his romantic success.

Always a meek and insecure youth, McCroskey was now profoundly and unbearably hurt by all that had happened in his life over the preceding weeks of late summer. As the hours passed, his emotional pain turned into something evil. In the wee hours of September 15, 2009, he violently took a sledge hammer to the sleeping heads of his former paramour, 16-year-old Emma Niederbrock, her visiting friend, MelanieWells, and Emma's mother, a college professor named Debra Kelly. 

When Melanie Wells' mother finally contacted the Farmville police, two officers were sent to the Niederbrock-Kelly home. McCroskey opened the door and reassured the officers that the three women were out to the movies. The police bought the story, but when Wells' mother called again, the officers returned to the home. However, by then McCroskey had murdered Mark Niederbrock and had left the crime scene, stealing the reverend's car.

Within minutes, McCroskey wrecked the 2000 Honda. Police arrived to file a report, totally unaware at that point of the murders. McCroskey was released and caught a ride with the tow truck driver, then called a taxi for a ride to Richmond International Airport, which was about an hour's drive from Farmville. The murderer was at last heading home to California. Or so he thought. According to the taxi driver, Curtis Gibson, McCroskey "spoke calmly and never raised [any] suspicion." Gibson said that McCroskey told him Emma became angry with him when she caught him going through her phone and accused him of invading her privacy. So, McCroskey claimed he didn't want to argue with her anymore and wanted to go home. 

McCroskey and Gibson continued on to the airport in Richmond, where the former hid in the baggage claim area until it was time to board his flight west. It would be a long wait, as the flight did not depart until late the next day. However, it was just enough time for police to locate and arrest McCroskey. He was indicted with six charges of first-degree murder, the two extra charges due to the intense brutality involved. 

In 1996,  Joe "The Cannibal" Metheny joined the ranks of serial killers who decided to serve their victims' bodies to people in food. He claimed to have killed several women, dismembered their bodies, and then fed the human meat to his customers at his small BBQ pit stand, turning everyone into unintentional cannibals. Metheny also worked as a truck driver and confessed that his first murder was motivated by the actions of his girlfriend, who abandoned their child because she was a drug addict. He kept killing from that point onward, and ended up with around nine victims - or so he claims.

Joe Roy Metheny - an urban legend come to life - was born in 1955 and grew up to became one of several killers who sold human meat as food in the early 1990s. Now, however, he is serving a life sentence in a Maryland prison. 

It's hard to tell the fact from fiction in Metheny's confession. Some news reports state that his first killings took place in 1994, while he has claimed that his serial murder spree actually began in 1976. The number of victims that he admits to have killed frequently changes as well. His known body count stands at nine, but there could be more, as he's bragged about killing others. He also claimed to have fed human meat to the customers of his small BBQ stand, but that could just be the talk of a madman. 

By all accounts, Metheny was not a little man. Many news stories describe him as being over six feet tall and weighing around 450 pounds. His intimidating size explains how he managed to overpower his victims, as well as explains how his last would-be victim - Rita Kemper - got away with her life. He couldn't run fast enough to catch her. 

In 1994, Metheny was living with his girlfriend and their six-year-old son in South Baltimore; however, he worked as a truck driver so he was gone for long stints of time on the road. One day, he came home and realized that his girlfriend abandoned him and taken their child. She was a drug addict and began living on the streets. Metheny said in his confession,

"I found out about six months later she had moved on the other side of town with some asshole that had her out selling her ass for drugs. They got busted for drugs and they took my son away from them for child neglect and child abuse." 

Metheny was so enraged by this that he went out to find his former girlfriend. He couldn't locate her, though, and instead ran into two homeless men. In a fit of anger, he killed them both with an axe and proceeded to chop them up into pieces, leaving their bodies where he had found them.

Metheny admitted to killing two women - Kimberly Spicer and Catherine Ann Magaziner - before dismembering them and putting their flesh into Tupperware containers that he kept in his trailer. Then, he decided to open up a small BBQ stand by the side of a busy Maryland road and served his unsuspecting customers human flesh - the flesh from Spicer and Magaziner's bodies. Metheny claimed that there was little difference between pork and human meat.

In 1994, Metheny was arrested and spent a year and a half in the Baltimore County Jail. He had been charged with the murder of the two homeless men that he chopped up and left under a bridge. He was denied bail, and had to sit in prison until his trial. However, due to a lack of evidence, he wound up getting away with the crime and was released from jail.

At the time of Kimberly Spicer's murder in the fall of 1995, she had been working as a prostitute in South Baltimore. Metheny was driving a forklift for a company that made wooden pallets and was living in a small trailer located near by his employer. One night, Metheny brought Spicer to his trailer where he brutally killed her, dismembering her body and discarding parts of it under some wooden pallets at his work - nobody noticed.

His last victim, Rita Kemper, was lucky. She was working as a prostitute in 1996 when Metheny kidnapped her and forced her into his trailer. He was gearing up to kill her, but she managed to get away, scaling an eight-foot-tall chain link fence as she fled. Kemper went straight to the authorities who, thankfully, believed her. Metheny was arrested for multiple murders shortly thereafter and confessed to all of his evil deeds.

During his confession to the authorities, Metheny admitted to committing some very horrific acts, one of which involved Catherine Magaziner's skull. She had been working as a prostitute when he invited her into his trailer. After she stepped inside, he stabbed and strangled her to death before dismembering her body. Apparently, six months later, he went back to the place where he had discarded some of her remains, found her skull, cleaned it off, and then had sex with it. 

Over the course of his killing spree, Metheny worked several different jobs, drifted in and out of homelessness, and spent most of his paychecks on drinks at local bars. He worked as a truck driver for a time before eventually getting a job at a wooden pallet factory driving a forklift. Later, he went on to open up what he described as a "BBQ pit stand," which he used as a way to dispose of the flesh of his victims by selling them as food.

The same night that he killed two homeless men, Metheny also went on to kill two prostitutes - luring them under a bridge and murdering them with the same axe he had used on the two men. A nearby fisherman, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, was then spotted by Metheny and was promptly killed as well. He then tossed all three bodies into a nearby river and placed rocks on top of them so that they wouldn't float to the surface. No evidence of them has ever been found.

Who knew that Ambien, that lovely little pill that puts so many people into a syrupy thick sleep, could cause so many people to have drug-induced freakouts? Crimes committed on Ambien aren’t like other drug crimes. Most of the assaults, accidental murders, and submarine arsons that people who are high on the world’s favorite sleep drug commit are clouded with a miasma of uncertainty. Similar to stories of people getting high on flakka and other designer drugs, Ambien users who commit crimes rarely remember doing anything other than going to bed and waking up in police custody. These Ambien horror stories are all straight out of your worst nightmares, and will definitely have you rethinking your prescription drug intake.

Not all Ambien crimes occur after people take the sleep drug; many of them concern creeps using the sleep aid to roofie someone before raping them, hoping that the hallucinatory side effects of the drug will remove the victim's memories of the crime. Everything on this list of the worst things people have done on Ambien is straight out of the horror section of your own brain. If you’re just judging by the stories included here, when people take Ambien, they murder their families, kill innocent strangers, and become locked in an elaborate nightmare scenario where they’re constantly living through a plane crash. Hopefully, there are a few people who are actually getting some sleep when they pop an Ambien at the end of the day.

In 2014, a judge labelled ex-Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, GOP head Robert Kerns a “sexually violent predator" after he drugged and raped a woman who was working as a paralegal at his North Wales law firm. According to the charges leveled against Kerns, he drugged the woman in the back of his Mercedes by giving her a cup of Ambien-laced wine.

Before the trial, Kerns’s lead attorney hired a group of "experts" to take a look at the victim's blood reports and, after they discovered the reports had been read incorrectly, he had authorities drop the charges. A state attorney brought a new case against Kerns immediately and, while many of the original charges had to be dropped, Kerns was sentenced to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. 

Joshua Boren, a police officer from Linden, Utah, spent the last year of his life drugging his wife, Kelly Boren, with Ambien and videotaping himself raping her while she was unconscious. His wife finally left him and, unable to deal the the repercussions of his actions, Boren killed his wife, their children, and his mother-in-law before turning the gun on himself. Just before their deaths, the couple entered into an intense text message argument where she said she wanted to end the marriage. In multiple text messages, she accused him of raping her. 

Prior to the murder-suicide, Boren allegedly Googled the terms “America’s most brutal serial killers” and “narcissism” before his shift ended at the police department. Then he sent a final text message to his mother: “I hope you are having a good day. Have a long and healthy life.”

Everyone's been in this situation but, unfortunately, Casey Fury didn't get away with it. In 2012, this civilian worker at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard was high on 14 Klonopin and an Ambien when he went to work and ignited two bags of rags aboard the USS Miami that burned for 12 straight hours inside the submarine. Fury was immediately caught and sentenced to 17 years in prison and ordered to pay a $400 million restitution. 

Back in 2016, a 75-year-old man from Renton, Washington, took an Ambien and had such an averse reaction that he believed he was in the middle of a plane crash. In the middle of his Ambien hallucination, the man called 911 and claimed that he was in a plane with three other people. The 911 call went like this: 

Operator: Are you able to safely get out?

Caller: No. I'm pinned in.

Operator: Did it hit any buildings or just into the trees?

Caller: In the trees. In the field with trees.

Afterward, the man, who refused to be identified, claimed he only took half of an Ambien because he couldn't sleep after surgery. Sleep expert Dr. Gandis Mazeika said, "It must have seem [sic] really real to him for him to call 911. It must have been like a real hallucination for him and that does speak to some of the potency of Ambien." 

In 2014, Darren Sharper, a former safety for the Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans Saints, was charged with a series of rapes. Prosecutors alleged he drugged women with Ambien and had his way with them. According to Arizona police, Sharper would pick women up in a bar, take them to his hotel room, and offer them a drink. Then, they would black out and wake up mid-sexual assault. In 2016, Sharper pleaded guilty to several sexual assault charges and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In April 2017, a 20-year-old who had a history of poor driving named Jack Young crashed his truck into a church bus and killed 13 senior citizens who were members of the First Baptist Church of New Braunfels, Texas. A witness who called 911 to report Young's erratic driving prior to the incident stopped to speak to Young after the crash and claimed that Young said, "I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was texting. I'm sorry, I'm sorry." It was later released that Young was not only driving and texting, but he was high on Clonazepam and the generic forms of Ambien and Lexapro during the crash. 

In Provo, Utah, in February 2017, two women made the heinous mistake of driving home from a night of drinking and decided to bring a child into the mayhem. Susanne McClellan accepted a ride home from her friend Chelsea Fuller after they had both been drinking and, unknown to anyone else at the time, Fuller was also high on citalpram, alprazolam, and Ambien. Rather than put her daughter in a child seat, McClellan held her daughter on her lap and, in the crash, the girl suffered massive head trauma, neck and spinal cord trauma, and broken bones in her skull, neck and ribs. She died a few hours later. According to the police report, Fuller's blood-alcohol content was .233, more than double the legal limit. 

Jackie Warner, the host of Bravo TV’s Work Out, allegedly crashed her car into an telephone pole in West Hollywood on February 24, 2017, while driving under the influence of Ambien and booze. To add an extra amount of uh-oh to this story, she struck a police patrol car and almost backed over a cop who was trying to keep her from fleeing the scene. According to Warner, the last thing she remembers is taking an Ambien at home and then waking up in a hospital under arrest. The arresting officer claims that Warner was driving without pants at the time of the DUI. 

On May 7, 2014, Nixon Bourguignon strangled his girlfriend in their apartment in Haverstraw, New York. According to police reports, their two children were sleeping nearby during the horrific events. After the arrest, Bourguignon's lawyer claimed that he was high on Ambien at the time of the murder, although doctors who treated Bourguignon directly following the incident said that he showed no signs of taking the sleep aid. His lawyer claims that the only thing he remembers is that he took two of the 10 mg pills on the night of his assault and then he woke up under arrest. In 2015, a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

In 2014, Curtis M. Campbell, a member of the school board in Gloucester County, New Jersey, was arrested for giving Ambien to two six-year-olds who were sleeping over at his house for unreported reasons. There was no talk of sexual misconduct on the part of Campbell, but it's still a really creepy thing to do. Two years later, he was sentenced to six years in prison after admitting he drugged the two children with his prescription sleeping pills.

There have been multiple cases where murder victims left messages and notes for the police to point them toward the killer. In some situations, victims created a digital trail for investigators to follow. These brave souls were able to exact their revenge on their murderers by letting the world know who killed them. Without their actions, police or prosecutors may not have been able to bring them to justice. 

Crimes solved by small clues are increasing more and more, thanks to technology. And not all hints are left on cell phones and laptops - some are posted on blogs and online boards like Reddit and WordPress, while others are written on good, old-fashioned paper. Check out these stories of victims who helped catch the culprits of their own murders from beyond the grave.

Modern technological advances in DNA have enabled victims to help police find their attacks. And in some cases, even their murders. One such example is Vanessa Marcotte. Marcotte was an up-and-coming accounts manager at Google, living a fascinating life in Silicon Valley. She was visiting her mother in Massachusetts when she went for a jog, during which she was attacked, raped, and murdered. Police had no clues, except for discovering that Marcotte had fought her attacker. Experts were able to extract the killer's DNA from beneath Marcotte's fingernails.

Tests were conducted and police found a match that led them straight to the killer. Angel Colon-Ortiz was arrested and charged with aggravated battery, aggravated assault, and assault with intent to rape and murder. 

Alexander Litvinenko was a former Russian intelligence expert who carried certain information and secrets with him to London. It was 2006 when Russia was still having its own version of the Wild West. Litvinenko thought he had escaped the clutches of the Putin regime and thus, welcomed a visit from a couple of former colleagues who met him for tea at a local cafe. 

Litvinenko was, of course, highly trained in observation of all others and all items around him. So, when he was taken exceedingly ill after taking tea with his old friends, he remembered that there was a certain pot from which only he had poured into his cup. He realized he was poisoned and informed police of the situation. While Litvinenko suffered and lingered in agonizing pain for weeks before passing, authorities searched and conducted tests on nearly every bit of crockery in the cafe where he'd taken the poison. His colleagues, of course, had long vanished.

One particular teapot in the cafe answered the question as to whether or not the poisoning had occurred and by what specific means. Police discovered the poison was the radio-active and fast-acting polonium. There was enough in the teapot's spout alone to kill several people. Unknowingly, the cafe staff had put the used teapot into the dishwasher and served it up to customers. 

Two young Indiana girls disappeared in February of 2017, striking fear into the hearts of their families and their community. The bodies of 14-year-old Liberty German and 13-year-old Abigail Williams were found on Valentine's Day, which made the deaths even more heartbreaking. The police immediately classified their deaths as a double homicide, the first in 20 years in the city.

Shortly after their bodies were discovered, the Indiana State Police released to the public an audio clip from German's cell phone that they believe is the voice of the murderer. It is only three seconds in length, but you can clearly hear a man's voice saying, "- down the hill." Police commended the maturity and cool-headedness of German for recording the voice of the suspect, calling her a "hero." They also found a photograph of the killer on the phone, and have commented that these are solid pieces of evidence that will hopefully point them toward catching the killer(s). 

Karen Perez was fifteen years old and had just completed her first year of high school in June of 2016. She went missing that same month. Initially, her family, community, and even her boyfriend helped search for her and spread the word of her disappearance. Rumor had it that she was last seen at her boyfriend's home. Within days, her body was found partially nude and crammed into a cabinet under the sink in a tawdry, empty apartment in Houston, Texas.

Even though she seemed helpless in death, Perez left texts on her cell phone and her boyfriend's cell phone that clarified what happened to her. Those text messages revealed that the boyfriend demanded she skip school on the Friday she disappeared and meet him by a local tennis court. His messages even came with a threat, with his final text stating that if she refused to meet him, he would kill her and that her life would "end on bloods."

More incriminating evidence was found on the boyfriend's phone, including audio that preserved Perez's last moments alive. Police listening to the audio could hear the boyfriend demanding Perez have sex with him, even calling her by name. She refused him and he began choking her. Perez cried out, "I don't want to die!" towards the end of the recording. The boyfriend was charged with murder and taken to juvenile court for prosecution. 

Amarjit Chohan, an English resident and businessman, was murdered in 2003 with his wife, children, and his mother-in-law. His killers dumped his body into the sea, thinking they had destroyed any and all evidence of their vicious crime. And yet, messages can come back from the grave, even when the grave is underwater. When searchers discovered his body, they found a piece of paper tucked into one of his socks. It was a letter that was addressed to one of his murderers, Kenneth Regan.

The subsequent police investigation suggests that Chohan was kidnapped by Regan, Bill Horncy, and Peter Rees. He was tied up and held prisoner in a house for several days. Police speculate that Chohan, anticipating his own murder, used the letter in his sock as a way to provide police with a clue. 

Arturo Gallegos and Juan Gallegos-Rodriguez were hanging out at Arturo's apartment in Spokane Valley, WA, in early November of 2014 when they were shot at close range by an unknown assailant. When investigators searched the apartment, they found a journal kept by Gallegos. One of the entries helped to enlighten the police and led to the arrest of a suspect. While the murders occurred in November, the pertinent entry was written in July, four months earlier. On that occasion, Gallegos recorded the following:

"This morning my nephew Chris Ramirez knocked on my door and woke up, I opened the door, but I never thought he would come at me with a kitchen knife threatening me and saying he was going to stab me. I kept telling him that I hadn't done anything, that's when he started accusing me of being with his girlfriend."

No harm came to Gallegos that day, according to his journal. He was able to escape that time by locking himself in his bedroom. Local police have no record that he contacted them about the July incident. While that was not enough evidence to charge Ramirez with the murders, police were able to arrest him on an unrelated charge, so that they could hold him while the investigation continued. Later that year, Ramirez was charged with double homicide. 

South African teacher Cebisile Happiness Khoza went for a country drive with her boyfriend and fellow school teacher, Siyamamkela Odwa Nompumza. Their destination was isolated and on a quiet dirt road. It was there that Mompumza took a knife and brutally stabbed Khoza repeatedly, then doused her with gasoline and set her ablaze. He left the scene, confident that no one would have a clue as to what happened. He even had an alibi prepared for the police.

What Nompumza did not know is that as his girlfriend lay mortally wounded and on fire, she was able to scratch the first three digits of his phone number into the dirt road. This heartbreaking evidence enabled police to question and subsequently arrest her murderer. 

This one was the first of its kind: a blogger recorded what led to his and his sister's murder in his final post. It was 2005 and Simon Ng had been living in the United States for a while. Finding himself lonely, Ng enrolled in college courses and started his own blog. Then, one day, Simon and Sharon were found dead in their apartment, both stabbed to death. Without Simon's blog, police would probably still be searching for the murderer. It turned out to be one of Sharon's ex-boyfriends, a man named Jin Lin. 

On the day of the murders, Simon had blogged the following: 

“Anyway today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister’s former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago! Hopefully he will leave soon...”

Police speculate that it was only minutes later that Lin attacked Simon, stabbing him over and over in the chest with a kitchen butcher's knife. He then tied Simon up and began searching the apartment for money or anything of value. Disappointed with his findings, Lin lay in wait for Sharon's return. She arrived home at 9:30 and Lin immediately began stabbing her and returned to stabbing the bound Simon. Simon died at the apartment while Sharon died about an hour later in a hospital. Lin was convicted of the double murder in 2008 and is now serving a life sentence in prison without parole.

No reason to beat around the burning bush: people are fascinated by Satan. Some love to hate Mr. 666, others straight-up love the infernal homeslice. The canon of Western literature is replete with works featuring the devil and his demons. Then you've got your Satanic metal bands, which span a number of subgenres. Black Sabbath's music had devilish themes, as did that of post-Sabbath doom pioneers like Pentagram. Even proto-metal groups like Coven and Led Zeppelin dabbled in the occult. 

Yet classic and psychedelic rock and metal is child's play compared to the savage assault and pitch-black lyrics of black, death, and blackened death metal. The members of bands like Mayhem, Burzum, Gorgoroth, and Empire have committed crimes in the name of black metal, Satan, and the occult ranging from murder to kidnapping, torture, and the burning of centuries-old churches (most black metal musicians, it should be noted, are peaceful people who just want to rock out). When asked about the foundational philosophy of his band's music, former Gorgoroth frontman Gaahl replied "Satan." The members of these bands were reacting against the imposition of Christianity on their culture, which was in part destroyed by monotheism. 

Enter the Beasts of Satan, a group of Italian metal devotees who discovered Satan and the occult through music and took things way too far, committing heinous crimes in the name of the Dark Lord. Facts about the Beasts of Satan take you back to the 1990s, to a town outside Milan, Italy, where a group of young men and their girlfriends formed a black or death metal band (media reports are unclear on which it was, in part because the band never released any recorded material). The band's name? The Beasts of Satan.

The band was associated with a sect of Satanism that made up its own demented occult rituals rooted heavily in drug use, which resulted in the brutal murders of at least three people. Beasts of Satan stories may seem like a demented real-life take on dark teen movies like The Lost Boys, but they are very true, and all the more terrifying for it. If you're curious how the Beasts of Satan killed, or went from being metalheads to murdering their best friends, or are looking for details of ritual murders committed by Beasts of Satan, sally forth. But be forewarned: media reports were filtered through many channels and mostly translated from Italian, resulting in some fuzzy, contradictory, and confusing details. 

When 16-year-old Fabio Tollis disappeared with his girlfriend Chiara Marino, his parents were told he had run off with Marnio. Michele Tollis, Fabio's father, refused to accept this explanation, and spent six years pursuing the truth. His journey led him to heavy music festivals across Europe, where he passed out fliers, and to the belief that Satanism was involved in his son's disappearance, in part because Marino's bedroom was supposedly filled with Satanic literature and paraphernalia. "No one can contradict me when I say that heavy metal and satanism are closely linked," he said. 

When Michele saw news of Volpe's arrest for the murder of Pezzotta, he recalled that his son had played in a band with Volpe. He contacted the authorities investigating Volpe and made his case that Volpe might know something about Fabio and Marino. As Italian investigator Teniente Enzo Molinari recalled:

"It was a strange story, the one Michele Tollis told. But he didn't only tell a story; he backed it up with a very convincing body of paperwork and photographs which he had gathered over the past six years. He had carried out a true investigation on the disappearance of his son and his son's girlfriend, all on his own."

Michele's story led to police questioning Volpe about the disappearance of Fabio and Marino. Volpe admitted to murdering the two, and took police to their grave. 

According to some reports, members of the Beasts of Satan tried, and failed, to kill Marino and Tollis a few weeks before successfully doing so. As per these reports, the group tried lighting the couple on fire in their car on December 31, 1997. Why Tollis and Marino would go into the woods with people who tried to burn them to death in a car is unclear - maybe the plan to do so never got past the ideation stage. 

Fueled by Italy's rampant Catholicism, the local media went into a frenzy when news of the killings broke. In the midst of this, reporters began looking into the lives of the victims. Italian newspaper reports painted Chiara Marino as a depraved Satanist whose bedroom was filled with goat skulls and black candles and who, according to alleged witness reports, engaged in acts of sexual violence. This is the same young woman who was murdered for being a personification of the Virgin Mary. 

Beasts of Satan drummer Andrea Bontade, who refused to take part in the murders of Tollis and Mariano, died after crashing a car into a wall at high speeds in 1998. He was drunk, and maybe high, at the time. According to the BBC, Bontade was "terrorized into committing suicide" by the other members of Beasts of Satan. Other reports suggest he was drugged by members of the band/cult and forced to commit suicide. When arrested, members of the group were tried for three murders - Mariano, Tollis, and Pezzotta - and one forced suicide.

In the wake of the Beasts of Satan murders, the Vatican elected to hold a course for priests and novices alike on the "phenomenon" of Satanism. The courses were held at Regina Apostolorum, a pontifical university in Rome, taught by Carlo Climati, and focused, according to the Los Angeles Times, "on the history, theology and sociology of Satanism and black magic, and the healing power of exorcism."  

According to Climati:

"There is a growing interest in satanic cults among youth today. They hear it in music, they find it on the Internet. Ten years ago when young people wanted to find out about Satanism, it was difficult. Now it's very easy...

It would be a big mistake to see the devil everywhere. There is no reason to panic. What we are teaching is how to know the language of Satanism, how to identify where [the phenomenon] is, and where it is not."

According to trial testimony, Chiara Marino, one of the first murder victims of the Beasts of Satan, was chosen for a ritual killing because she personified the Virgin Mary to the members of the group. Perhaps ironically, Marino's bedroom was supposedly found filled with Satanic literature and paraphernalia.

Some reports on the Beasts of Satan state Italian police tried to pin three additional deaths on the group. The deceased, Antonio Lombardo, Stefano Longone, and Luca Colombo were all friends of Sapone who died in 2003, 1998, and 2004, respectively. Lombardo lit himself on fire, Longone was run over by a truck, and Colombo was found hanged. 

The Beasts of Satan quietly subsisted for six years after the murders of Marino and Tollis before killing again on January 24, 2004. Andrea Volpe and his girlfriend Elizabeth Ballarin lured Volpe's ex, Mariangela Pezzota, 27 at the time, to a remote location with the promise of a meal. Volpe believed she knew too much about the deaths of Mariano and Tollis and might go to the police. 

Volpe, who was high on a mixture of cocaine and heroin (as was Ballarin), shot Pezzota in the face after an argument erupted while they were drinking champagne. She didn't die from the gunshot, so Volpe they called Sappone for assistance. He arrived, reprimanded Volpe for being an inept murderer, and helped him bury Pezzota alive after carting her away from the scene of the crime.

After disposing of Pezzota, Volpe and Ballarin, the latter of whom was 18 at the time, decided to get rid of Pezzota's car by sinking it in the Ticino river. On their way to doing so, Ballarin, who was driving Pezzota's car, crashed. Volpe, who was following in his car, came to her aid. Police then showed up and took them both to the hospital after realizing they were out of their minds on drugs. While under observation and still high, Ballarin muttered various things that led police to Pezzota's body the next morning.  

While most accounts of Pezzotta's killing note she was buried alive, at least two - one in the Los Angeles Times, another in the Independent - state Sapone killed her with a shovel upon discovering she was still alive. According to the Independent, Sapone shouted "This is disgusting you don't even know how to kill someone" at Volpe before killing Pezzotta. 

Writing in the Los Angeles Times in 2005, Tracy Wilkinson made a case for the occult and Satanic aspects of the Beasts of Satan crimes being symptoms of a more predictable disease - social conditions. "Experts warn against exaggerating the phenomenon. Drugs, for example, appear to have played at least as much of a role in the killings as the devil," Wilkinson wrote. As she reported, one of the accused tried to plead insanity on the basis of being so high on LSD she had no idea what she was doing. 

Citing the work of sociologists, Wilkinson points to a high number of disaffected youth in the Milan area, where migration and various other factors weakened typically strong Italian family structure and poverty and housing projects gave rise to drug use and other petty crime, as well as the modern disease of alienation. 

Chiara Marino, 19, and Fabio Tollis, 16, had no idea what they were getting into when they left the heavy metal bar Midnight Pub and went off into the woods with friends Andrea Volpe, Nicola Sappone, and Mario Maccione on January 17, 1998. All five were involved in the underground metal scene around Milan, Italy, and had gotten heavily invested in Satanism and the occult through lyrical themes prominent in black and death metal. Tollis, who was dating Marino, played in a death metal band with some of the others; you can hear Ferocity, for which Maccione contributed guitar and vocals, here.

On account of their interest in the occult and Satan, the friends belonged to a sect of Satanism called Beasts of Satan, which may or may not have extended beyond a small group of eight or so friends (media coverage in strictly Catholic Italy was predictably hysterical and prone to invention and hyperbole, so it's hard to tell what this sect actually constituted). Volpe, Sappone, and Maccione were also members of a band called Beasts of Satan, which revolved around the Satanic sect. They dabbled in a hodgepodge of occult rites and beliefs with Satan at the center; their brand of Satanism was a far cry from established religious and philosophical Satanism such as of The Church of Satan or the Satanic Temple. 

On that fateful night in January '98, Marino and Tollis were murdered in what has been described as a "drug-fueled Satanic ritual in woods near Somma Lombardo, northwest of Milan." Marino was stabbed in the heart and Tollis bludgeoned with a hammer when he tried to protect her; he was then gagged and had his throat slit. The Italian media dubbed the crime "an orgy of violence."

The evening ended with Marino and Tollis being dumped in a pit, which Volpe, Sappone, Maccione, and other members of the Beasts of Satan filled with dirt and urinated on. According to Volpe, one member of the group danced on the grave while shouting "Zombies, now you're only zombies."

Cannibalism remains one of the strangest and most disgusting crimes a person can possibly commit, and famous cannibal serial killers possess a level of infamy unique to their crimes. While some cultures around the world cannibalize as part of their society, the lone cannibal killers in this list acted on their own selfish and twisted impulses. Childhood abuse and psychological trauma account for many of these cannibals' motives, but many simply wanted to know what human flesh tasted like, and used dirty methods to find out. In some cases, these cannibals roam free, either escaped from their holding cells or released on a technicality. 

In addition to eating victims' flesh, cannibal murderers performed all types of psychological and physical torture not only on their victims but also their relatives. Some killers even tricked people into eating human flesh. Hailing from all around the world, from urban epicenters to rural villages, cannibal killers know no restrictions when it comes to location. Read further if you dare, but be warned; this isn't a list to peruse during your lunchbreak.

Matej Curko, a resident of Slovakia, used the Internet to lure in his victims - with the promise of being eaten. In many cases, Curko lured victims into meeting with him so he could kill them; allegedly two of his female victims consented to Curko's request. When Curko began online-chatting with Markus Dubach, a suicidal man in Switzerland, Curko was honest about his intentions. Curko kept an extensive amount of murder "trophies" in his home, including the bodies of two women who had disappeared the previous year. After Curko revealed these trophies, Dubach informed authorities.

During a sting operation, an undercover agent met up with him. This turned into a gun battle, in which Curko was shot five times. He died later that day in the hospital. Despite Curko's online interactions where he claimed his victims allowed his cannibalism, the high number of missing persons surrounding him suggests otherwise.

Suspected murderer Matthew Williams, 34, had just been released from prison a few weeks, after served a five-year prison sentence for a violent attack on his partner. While at the hotel, which also served as a bail hostel, Williams lured a young woman back to his room despite the building's rules against guests. When staff came to his room to notify Williams of the policy, they found him eating the woman's face off.

According to Jill Edwards, a local resident who described Williams as "an animal," they entered his room after not getting a response from Williams. This attack would prove to be his last, as he was struck by a high voltage taser when apprehended by police. Though formally arrested following the tasing, William became "unresponsive" moments later and died.

 

On May 26th, 2012, 31 year-old Rudy Eugene told his girlfriend "I'm going to be late. I love you and I'll be back." Sometime thereafter, Eugene ripped off his clothes and attacked a homeless man in broad daylight in Miami, FL. At the time thought to be on the drug commonly known as "bath salts," Eugene began by tearing away at the homeless man's face with his teeth. This happened over the course of 18 minutes.

The victim, Ronald Poppo (age 65), was just an innocent person in the way of Eugene's bath salt-induced rage. Footage of the crime showed Eugene jumping onto the homeless man, who was sleeping at the time, stripping off the man's clothing, and then attacking Poppo with his teeth. The man survived, but lost 75% of his face. Eugene was shot to death by police at the scene; since the toxicology report ruled out the presence of bath salts, the cause of Eugene's violent episode remains unknown.

Born Hamilton Howard Fish on May 19, 1870, the man who would later be known as "The Gray Man," "The Werewolf," "The Brooklyn Vampire," and "The Boogey Man," grew up in an orphanage. Albert Fish, the name he chose to go by, horrifically spent his early years drinking urine and eating feces. By 1890, he lived in New York City and became a male prostitute. At that time, he also started raping young boys under the age of six.

A male lover once took him to a wax museum where he saw and was fascinated by a bisection of a penis (which is when a penis is split directly in half), which led to his obsession with castration. He wound up trying this on a few of his victims.

Fish boasted that he abused, tortured, or even cannibalized one child in every U.S state, but was only ever actually suspected of and convicted for about eight of them. The case that made him famous (as it led to his final arrest) was the abduction and murder of Grace Budd. He pretended to be taking her to his niece's birthday party, to which her parents consented, but Budd was never brought back.

He later sent a letter to her parents that described exactly how he coerced her into trusting him. It also contained details about how he killed her and ate some of her flesh. He was executed via the electric chair in 1936, with his "final statements" withheld by his lawyer for being "the most filthy string of obscentities." 

In 2012, Vince Weiguang Li, who recently acquired Canadian citizenship, suffered a break with reality. Eight years prior, Li claimed "the voice of God" began speaking to him, which told him he was the second coming of Jesus destined to fight against an alien invasion. While traveling on a Greyhoud bus, Li snapped and began stabbing fellow passenger, Tim McLean, believing the man to be one such alien.

Li wound up decapitating McLean while on the bus, in full view of everyone else on it, and then began eating pieces of the man's flesh and licking blood off of his hands. Needless to say, the bus stopped and everyone fled, leaving Li on the bus where he continued to slice McLean's body into small pieces until the authorities intervened. Li has since been diagnosed with schizophrenia. 
 

Issei Sagawa famously committed a brutal crime, and remains free to do it again. Sagawa became a notorious semi-celebrity in his native Japan in 1981 after killing and eating a Dutch exchange student named Renee Hartevelt. After inviting Hartevelt to his apartment in Paris to read and study poetry, he shot her in the neck, fornicated with her corpse, and then spent two days carving up and eating her body. Sagawa later said he had hoped by eating the beautiful Hartevelt to absorb her healthy energy.

Initially imprisoned in France for the crime, Sagawa was later extradited in Japan, where his crime became a subject of intense public fascination. Sagawa is currently a free man, living in Tokyo and working as a writer, restaurant reviewer, and guest speaker.

Before his current residency at a psychiatric hospital, Alexander Spesivtsev shared an apartment with his mother, where he killed up to 80 people (but was only convicted of 19) and ate a good majority of them. Unsurprisingly, he's been declared insane and is thankfully behind government-secured doors in Russia. If not for a bit of building maintenance, Spesivtsev might never have been captured. When radiators began malfunctioning in Spesivtsev's apartment complex, his neighbors called a plumber, who ended up opening the door by force when Spesivtsev failed to answer.

The plumber found a mutilated, headless body in the bathtub, bowls with pieces of human meat in them in the kitchen, and a mutilated Olga Galtseva somehow still alive on the sofa. She died shortly after, but was able to tell her story. The creepiest part is that Spesivtsev's mother lured the women into the apartment for him to rape, beat, kill, and eat.

Shortly after giving birth to her newborn son, 24-year-old Li Zhenghua clamped her jaws down on the infant's arm. When a nurse attempted to save the child, Zhenghua tightened her bite, requiring multiple workers to loosen it. Hospital staff eventually pried the woman's mouth open and rescued the little boy, but not before he sustained heavy bruising and bleeding. The hospital sedated Zhenghua. and transferred her child to a more secure room in the hospital.

Authorities never determined what went wrong, but apparently, Zhenghua lived on the streets for several weeks after her mother-in-law kicked her out of the house due to her unusual behavior. The family didn't tell anyone Zhenghua was pregnant, and she was only rushed to the hospital when strangers saw her going into labor. 

Yoo Young-chul, a South Korean resident, murdered 21 people between 2003 and 2004, and occasionally at their livers. His victims fell into two categories: prostitutes (he was apparently upset with women in general after his girlfriend broke up with him), and elderly folks. Initially, Yoo broke into elderly residences, where he would bludgeon victims with a hammer, covering his tracks by making them looking like homicide-home invasions. In one instance, Yoo burned down a building to hide his crimes. 

When police intensified their investigation, Yoo relocated to a Seoul apartment, where he made appointments with female masseuses. To dispose of their remains, Yoo cut the bodies into pieces, removing their fingerprints, and scattering the bags throughout the mountainside. Initially captured after a massage parlor relayed Yoo's requests for a masseuse to authorities, Yoo managed escape after feigning epilepsy to get his restraints removed. He was sentenced to death for his crimes, the first person sentenced since 1997.

On April 9th of 2002, rapper Big Lurch, aka Antron Singleton, and his friend, Thomas Moore, spent the night smoking PCP, which they blame for Singleton's actions during the next 24 hours.

Singleton subsequently murdered his roommate, Tynisha Ysais, and consumed parts of her body. Tooth marks were found on her face and lungs, which were completely torn from her chest cavity. When finally arrested, Singleton was naked, covered in blood, and standing in the middle of the street yelling at the sky. Serving a life-sentence in California, Singleton occasionally gives interviews detailing the dangers of drugs like PCP upon everyday citizens.

Sometimes, the smallest towns hide the biggest secrets. That was the case with the Texas Slave Ranch, one of the state's creepiest stories. Walter Wesley Ellebracht Sr. and his extended family had lived in Mountain Home, TX, for generations, and they were known as decent folk. But something strange began happening on their ranch in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. People - mostly drifters - began disappearing around the property.

What happened at the Texas Slave Ranch? True stories from Mountain Home lay out the chilling details. Walter Ellebracht, along with accomplices, had kidnapped, enslaved, and tortured people on the property. At least one man was presumed dead. Finally, in 1984, the authorities raided the property on a tip. They rescued six people, but what else they discovered was nothing short of gruesome: bone fragments and tapes of torture sessions.

Ellebracht and a few others went to trial in 1986 and were ultimately convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit aggravated kidnapping. However, they were effectively acquitted of murder, and there are many who believe justice has yet to be served. The men involved might have been found guilty, but they barely saw any jail time. These Texas Slave Ranch facts illustrate a sordid chapter in the South's history.

Prisoners at the Ellebracht ranch performed a number of duties, almost always the most labor-intensive and punishing available. One of the primary tasks was the cutting of firewood and harvesting of cedar trees. They performed these jobs chained together, and when they were done with the cutting and sawing, they were forced to carve pieces of cedar into keychains that were sold in stores around the Mountain Home community.

Though there were no claims of sexual assault made by the men and women held captive at the Ellebracht ranch, the wife of a foreman on the ranch did make such a claim. Sheri Hamilton said that every morning she was forced to kiss the ranch owner's son, Walter Ellebracht Jr., and to do it in front of her husband. She claimed the abuse led to rape:

"He [Walter Ellebracht, Jr.] made me take my clothes off. He took off his clothes. He then made me have sex with him."

None of Hamilton's testimony ever made it into the court room, since Ellebracht Jr. wasn't on trial for sexual assault. The trial judge later stated that "it would have led to an automatic reversal of a verdict in the case" - that is, Ellebracht Jr.'s conviction for conspiracy to commit murder and aggravated kidnapping

According to victim testimonies, inmates at the Texas Slave Ranch knew to keep their mouths shut and to keep working, no matter how exhausted they became. If they talked back, they would be on the receiving end of twisted mind games.

Joyce Ellebracht would shoot at stones and bottles placed near the slaves' feet to see how close she could get without injuring them. Other slaves were ordered to dig holes they were told would be their graves. On another occasion, the Ellebrachts showed up in the slave quarters with a bag containing red Jello and pieces of beef; they told the prisoners the bag held the remains of a slave who "got smart."

When Texas police raided the Ellebracht ranch in 1984, they found five men and one woman living in a barn there. They all claimed that they had been brought to the property with the promise of a hot meal.

According to ranch records, at least 75 people had been employed there at one time or another. One had escaped and alerted the authorities, triggering the raid.

Walter Wesley Ellebracht III was only 9 years old when Texas police raided his family's ranch in 1984. The child had spent some of his early years in an environment that can only be described as perverse. Over the next two years, due to the trial and massive media coverage, Ellebracht learned more about the sordid activities on his family's property. He was shunned for being an Ellebracht as well.

The man who eventually came to be known as "Wes" later changed his last name to distance himself from his family. He died in a car accident in 2012, at the age of 38.

For Anthony Bates, the punishments doled out on the Ellebracht ranch proved to be fatal. Bates had injured his leg while working on the ranch, and was mostly incapacitated. That didn't matter to the Ellebrachts; they began to torture him with the cattle prod. Bates did not survive, and his body was doused in gasoline and set aflame - apparently while his captors listened to Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire."

Survivors of the slave ranch pointed police to bones that remained after the attempted cremation.

Life for the abused captives on the Texas Slave Ranch was a never-ending nightmare. They even slept chained in the dirt. Survivors reported being shackled at the end of each work day, and being put to bed in a metal barn. The building was freezing in the winter and burning hot in the summer, and the captives were denied pillows and blankets. There were no bathroom facilities, either, so they had to sleep in their own filth.

Men held as slaves at the ranch endured a variety of tortures. Some of the torture sessions were even audio-recorded, and played later in court during the trial. On the tape, voices can be heard begging someone named "Robert" to stop shocking them. A male voice responds, "Tell Robert it feels good. Say it feels good... I love to see the sparks fly."

The sparks came from an electric cattle prod used by the torturer. The actual prod was discovered when police entered and searched the Ellebrachts' ranch in 1984. The battery-operated device released up to 4,0000 volts of electricity.

One of the slave ranch victims, Mark Allen Hamilton, claimed in a court deposition that even some of the victims participated in the torture of fellow prisoners. He cited the case of Anthony Bates, who, due to an injured leg, was unable to work. Bates was shocked by the cattle prod sometimes more than 30 times in a torture session, including shocks administered to his genitals and tongue.

By the time the Texas Slave Ranch case went to trial in 1986, the shocking story had made its way around the country and the world. Ten people were charged with crimes, and the major players - Walter Ellebracht Sr., Walter Ellebracht Jr., and a ranch foreman, Carlton Robert Caldwell - were convicted of conspiracy to commit aggravated kidnapping. However, no one was convicted of the murder of Anthony Bates. It's unclear why, but the lack of solid physical evidence may have let the men off. Only bone fragments were found at the property.

The case prosecutor, Ronald Sutton, asked the judge for life sentences for the three convicted defendants, but the judge had other ideas. Walter Ellebracht Sr. only received probation. Walter Jr. was given a 15-year sentence, but remained free thanks to a number of appeals. Caldwell was sentenced to 14 years, but served only three. The men continued to live in the area after the trial, though the ranch was sold off.

Why the light sentences? A local attorney theorized that, because the victims were drifters, "they were seen as less entitled to the benefits than the rest of us are."

Travis Boyd, a 38-year-old construction worker from Las Vegas, was hitchhiking when Walter Wesley Ellebracht Sr. picked him up and offered him a job on his ranch. Boyd stayed the night, but decided to leave the next day. Before he could exit the property, though, Ellebracht, his son and wife, and some ranch hands approached him, armed to the teeth.

Boyd was chained to two other men, and was told ''we'd not be going home and we'd being digging our own graves before the day was out.''

The name "Kentucky Cannibal" sounds like it might refer to a deranged cousin of Jeffrey Dahmer, or perhaps be a perverse association to fried chicken. However, the Kentucky Cannibal actually refers to a mid-19th century American man - a frontiersman from Kentucky who had been raised by a good family, but completely lost his mind before he reached 20 years old.

His name was Boone Helm, and after he ruined his life back home and bankrupted his parents, he left everything behind to start a new life in California. While Helm would never have earned a spot on any "Most Likely To Succeed" list, no one would have imagined that he'd become a notorious old west serial killer with a penchant for human flesh.

All those charged were convicted, and Helm and the other gang members were hanged before 6,000 witnesses by the Montana Vigilantes in Virginia City, MT. Back east, the Civil War was still raging on but, that day, Helm's hanging even beat out headlines from the battlefield. As he watched one of his fellow gang members swing from the gallows, he called out: "Kick away, old fellow. My turn next. I'll be in Hell with you in a minute."

When it came time for Helm to step forward, he purportedly cried out, "Every man for his principles! Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Let 'er rip!" and proceeded to leap from the box on which he was standing before the executioner had a chance to kick it away.

You can even still pay a visit to Helm at Virginia City's famous Boot Hill cemetery.

Even though the United States was still mostly wilderness, word about the Kentucky Cannibal started to spread across the country. Helm was on the run from the very beginning of his journey, but the search for the flesh-eating frontiersman continued to heat up the closer he got to California.

He managed to make it to San Francisco, where he might have been able to continue eluding authorities, but Helm was incapable of keeping a low profile. While in the city, he killed a man who had actually provided him with shelter from the police. Helm then took off north for Oregon, where he continued his crime spree of robbing and murdering random individuals.

But by 1862, he finally ran out of luck. After he shot an unarmed man at a bar, he tried to take off again, by now feeling that he was somehow immune to justice. Then, while he was hiding from the law, he killed yet another man, who was also a fugitive, and proceeded to eat him. Not long after that, local sheriffs were finally able to apprehend Helm, and he was brought in for trial.

By the time Helm reached Idaho, he and the men who were still accompanying him had started running low on food supplies. At first, they made do by killing some of their horses and eating them. Ever resourceful, the frontiersmen also used the horses' hides to construct sturdy snowshoes; however, winter was upon them and the journey became wretchedly difficult at times.

Eventually only two men remained in the party: Helm and another man named Burton. Both were tough as nails, but slowly Burton started to weaken and told Helm he just couldn't continue on. Helm decided to leave him behind, but soon after heard a gunshot. He returned to discover (according to his version of the story) that Burton had killed himself. Unfazed, Helm then cut off Burton's legs and roasted them, eating one and wrapping up the other to take along for the rest of the journey.

While there is no official record of when exactly Boone Helm first sampled human flesh, on his journey out to California he encountered a variety of people and apparently killed many of them as it suited him. As a result, he almost always had wilderness law enforcement on his trail. At one point, he was traveling deep into the wilderness with six other men and, one evening around the campfire, confided in the men by saying, "Many's the poor devil I've killed, at one time or another...and the time has been that I've been obliged to feed on some of 'em."  But what exactly did he mean by that? Was he perhaps suggesting that since they were already dead there was no need to let all that meat go to waste?

In 1864, the law once again caught up with Boone Helm - this time in Montana and with no one left to bail him out. He'd really pushed the envelope this time by joining up with a well-known criminal gang led by Henry Plummer. Ever the showman, during the trial Helm marched up to the witness stand and kissed the Bible before he began his testimony. In addition to being a cannibal, thief, and murderer, Helm was also a notorious liar, and proceeded to perjure himself, blaming all his nefarious and disgusting activities on the other gang members.

Around 1850, Boone Helm decided to venture west to find gold in California, and he wanted to bring a travel companion along with him. So, he invited his cousin, Littlebury Shoot, to join him. Shoot was intrigued, but as the departure date drew closer, he got cold feet. Everybody knew Helm was crazy, so it probably was not the best idea to take off into the wilderness with him. So, Shoot told Helm that he was going to stay in Missouri and, as a result, Helm became so angry that he stabbed Shoot in the chest and killed him.

Helm didn't start out his life as a cannibal. In fact, his family was rather well-regarded in Kentucky. But by the time Helm was a teenager, he was known to be the sort of guy who would pick fights with other men just so that he could show off.

One of his favorite stunts was to throw a Bowie knife into the ground, then walk a short distance away, mount a horse and race at full gallop back to the knife, swing his body off the speeding horse, and grab the knife. Coming from a pioneering family, he was a solid frontiersman and fully self-sufficient - maybe even too much so. He also had some trouble with authority, and once, while escaping the clutches of a sheriff who wanted to arrest him, rode his horse right inside the courthouse while it was in session, interrupting the judge to give him a piece of his mind.

Helm was also a heavy drinker, which may have had something to do with his erratic behavior. He married while still a teenager and became notorious for abusing his young wife. His father eventually interceded when the frightened wife filed for divorce, and he agreed to pay all of the court costs. Having ruined his family's reputation, Helm decided to head west and start a new life. His family would never have guessed what this decision would lead to.

Helm came from a big family and was one of 12 children. Somehow, he managed to reach out to one of his brothers, "Old Tex," while he was incarcerated and awaiting trial. He knew that news of his being accused of stealing, murder, and cannibalism had spread across the entire North American continent, and that he would surely be hung.

Perhaps for the first time in his life he was scared - so he begged his brother to help extricate him from the situation. As usual, money talked - particularly in the Wild West. Old Tex had some money to throw in, so he went to visit all of the named witnesses in the case and paid them all off. With no witnesses or evidence, authorities had no choice but to set Boone Helm free. And, of course, he went right back to his wicked ways.

There are plenty of stories, both historical and modern, of instances when cannibalism was used as a means of survival. And there were even a few times when Boone Helm, the Kentucky Cannibal, was so desperate to survive that he resorted to that level of cannibalism; however, he was also known to pack fresh cuts of human flesh to carry with him on his travels, well ahead of any potential life crisis!

During Helm's journey to California, he had a habit of stopping in every saloon along the way. He was, after all, a fan of alcohol. And since he always robbed his victims, he had a rather steady cash flow, including gold coins, burning a hole in his pocket. Sometimes he would bring an intended victim into the saloon with him, or meet a new victim while enjoying a drink. It was a great way to target victims, since their guard was down because of the alcohol. What none of them suspected though, was that while they had come to the bar for a drink, they would wind up being on the menu!

Can you think of anything more terrifying than hearing someone being murdered over the telephone? Today nearly everyone carries a phone with them everywhere they go, which has led to an increasing number of people who have had to experience the paralyzing fear that comes with listening to a murder being committed over the phone with no way to help. 

In some cases, individuals were simply having a conversation with a friend or family member when tragedy struck. In other cases, witnesses or victims have contacted 911 dispatchers, who then have to listen to the murders as their happening over the phone. Still others place a call just to make sure that a record of their murder is preserved as evidence. Murders that occur during phone calls can indeed help to convict a killer, but the experience of listening to it as it is happening has to be one of the most frightening and heartbreaking experiences one can endure.

Once more people began carrying cell phones, the opportunity for emergency phone calls to be placed has increased significantly. Such was the case in the tragic event that occurred in Orlando, FL, in 2016, which ended with the deaths of a mother and her two young children.

The first call that came in concerning the case came from a local Chili's restaurant, where the caller reported that a fight had broken out in the parking lot. Within minutes, numerous calls were coming in to 911 reporting a fatality at the same location. Recordings of those calls reveal the heartbreaking last moments of thirty-one-year-old Chericia Brown. Her estranged husband, Henry Romone Brown, was clearly a deeply troubled man with ferocious anger in his heart. He approached his wife in the parking lot and took his anger out on her by stabbing her, and then driving a car into her and two others.

One of the 911 callers was by Chericia's side when she fell, and was helping to care for her wounds. The caller stated "It looks like she got stabbed, She's awake. She keeps saying, 'Help me, help me.' She's not being very responsive." Seconds later, the voice of another woman cried out, "Oh my God!" and the horrifying sound of a car hitting bodies came across the phone line. At that point, chaos erupted, and the 911 operator could hear only screaming and the sounds of running. One of the callers then told the operator that a car had hit three people, including Brown: "There's two [knocked] out, and another one's crying." The dispatcher asked for more details as to the victims' conditions, and the caller responded, "There's one that's dead, so..."

That one fatality was Chericia Brown, who was pronounced dead later that evening at the hospital. The two people helping her, one a nurse and the other a paramedic, were also injured, but thankfully survived.

Unfortunately, the evening held still more tragedy. Henry Brown managed to get away from the scene of the crime and drove to a nearby hospital, where he engaged in a shootout with local authorities. He then fled the hospital parking lot, with the police hot on his heels. When they finally caught up to him, the couple's two children were found dead inside their father's vehicle.

Rachel Jeantel was on the phone with Trayvon Martin just moments before he was shot by neighborhood vigilante, George Zimmerman. Jeantel was a good friend of Martin's, and the two were catching up on the phone as he walked down the street in Sanford, FL, on a late February night in 2012.

As the two were talking, Martin mentioned that a "man was watching" him, describing the man as a "creepy-a** cracker." Both Martin and Jeantel became a little anxious at that point, but continued their conversation. Jeantel testified that Martin told her he was trying to lose the man by walking back home. But Zimmerman continued to follow Martin, who was clearly becoming more anxious, according to Jeantel.

Soon, Martin told her that the man was right behind him. She advised him to run, which he did, and then the call was dropped. She called him back immediately and he was able to pick up and answer. She heard Martin say, "Why are you following me for?" Jeantel said she then heard the heavy breathing of the man standing next to Martin. "What are you doing around here?" he demanded of Martin. Then Jeantel heard some shuffling as Martin's phone headset fell off. She heard Martin shout, "Get off!" and then the call was lost again. Jeantel looked at her phone to see that the call ended at 7:16 p.m.

Sometimes people not only hear murders being committed over the phone, but actually witness the crimes via Skype or Facetime. Famed boxer, Floyd Mayweather, unfortunately became one of these people when he bore witness to a criminal act being committed by his friend, rapper Earl Hayes.

Hayes had called Mayweather claiming to be severely depressed and that he was thinking of killing himself. Mayweather spent two hours on Facetime trying to convince his friend not to commit suicide. At some point, though, Hayes put the phone down with Mayweather still connected and listening. Mayweather then heard Hayes walk away into the bathroom where he suddenly shot his wife, Stephanie Moseley. He then calmly returned to the phone and resumed his Facetime conversation with Mayweather, who was horrified. According to the boxer, Hayes was still determined to kill himself. Mayweather continued to plead with this friend, but it was of no use - the troubled rapper shot and killed himself, too.

In 2004, drug-crazed killer Danielle Lee Fels decided to make a phone call while in the midst of her murder spree in Brisbane, Queensland. Fels went to the home of siblings April and Ian Bailey in order to scare them into giving their drugs to her. However, things didn't go as planned, and when she called her friend Jacqueline Graham, she had already killed Ian Bailey, telling Graham, "I think he is dead."

Next, according to Graham, she heard "blood curdling screams" from an unknown woman. “It sounded like the woman was terrified and the scream was a blood-curdling sort,” Graham told police. Fels, who was 34 at the time and the mother of five children, wasn't charged until 2016, when she was finally brought in for murdering the Bailey siblings.

One evening, Prabha Arun was walking home from her job at an IT department in Sydney, Australia. She was chatting on the phone with her husband, Kumar, when out of nowhere, Prabha was stabbed only a few feet away from her home. Her husband, of course, had no idea what was happening to her, but became terrified when he heard her scream, "I think I've been stabbed!" He then heard her pleading with her attacker and screaming for help. She begged the man to not harm her and offered up all of her possessions if he would just leave her alone. Those may have been her last words, as the phone line then went dead and her husband was left horrified.

Police quickly found Prabha, who was still alive, and took her to a nearby hospital where she later died.

Nicola Cross was at her home in St. Albans, England, with her children when someone suddenly began banging on the front door. Nicola did not recognize the stranger and refused to open the door. She made a call to the police, and then phoned her husband, Daniel, who was away on business, and was assessing the situation with him when the man at the door broke into the home.

Nicola, 37, calmly told her husband to hang on while she investigated. Then, her husband heard frightening sounds from over the phone. Nicola was shouting at the intruder, "Get out of my house! What do you want?" Then he heard her beg, "You don't need to do this, you don't." A male voice then responded, "I do, I do." It turned out to be the voice of Marcin Porczynsk, a Polish auto mechanic, and the crazed individual who had broken in to the family's home. Daniel suddenly heard his wife scream, and then there was silence.

Court and medical experts later stated that Porczynsk brutally stabbed her, and that Nicola likely died almost instantly. Daniel, was quoted in his victim impact statement as stating, “I was on the phone before, during, and after. That phone call plays over and over in my head, along with Nik’s screams and her pleading for her life. I will never forgive myself for not being there to protect her. I am totally and utterly heartbroken. Our family had been broken and our futures taken away from us in a blink of an eye.”

Nicola Cross was murdered in front of her children, who survived the attack. Porczynsk pled guilty to a lower murder charge and is now in prison.

Joe Horn, of Pasadena, TX, was a man who minded his own business and was considered by many in his neighborhood to be a grandfatherly figure - but he was also very protective of his property. In 2007, when some neighborhood burglars came into his yard and began stealing some of his belongings, he called 911 and reported the activity along with his intentions to defend his property using a shotgun.

He reminded the dispatcher that Texas had a castle law, which under certain circumstances permitted a property owner to use firearms against intruders. The dispatcher remained on the line with Horn, trying to persuade him not to venture outside the house. "It's not worth killing anyone over," he pleaded with Horn. The dispatcher also warned Horn that officers were on their way to the scene, and that Horn should exercise extreme care so that he would not be shot and that the arriving officers would not be harmed.

Horn continued to speak to the dispatcher, one hand on the phone, the other on his shotgun. Finally, he announced that he was going out. He would not stand for anyone coming onto his property and stealing from him. The dispatcher continued to listen and then heard Horn say loudly, "Bang! You're dead!" followed by a series of gunshots. The suspected thief fell to the ground and was later pronounced dead.

In March 2013, a Dallas, TX, 911 dispatcher received a call from a woman named Deanna Cook, who was frightened for her life. The dispatcher remained on the line with her for at least eleven minutes. The dispatcher initially tried to get an address from Cook, but to no avail. The terrified Cook pleads over and over, "I'm not doing anything. Baby, please..." while her attacker mutters, angrily, "I'll kill you. I'll kill you. I'll kill you."

Within moments, the dispatcher hears Cook choking and apparently being strangled. Cook never speaks again on the call, but the dispatcher continues to listen, without notifying police that a murder is taking place. The only sound that is heard after the choking is the frightened barking of Cook's dog. Police finally arrived at the residence fifty minutes after the call ended. No one answered the door, but Cook was later found strangled to death inside the home. The dispatcher was severely questioned as to why she did not label the call as a murder case when she notified the police department. Cook's ex-husband, Delvecchio "Red" Patrick was charged with her murder.

In January 2016, Michelle Enright of Victoria, Australia, answered her phone to hear the frightened voice of her cousin, 39-year-old Samantha Kelly. Kelly told her that "they" had put something strange into her drink and that she was feeling "drowsy and funny in the head." Kelly pleaded with Enright to stay on the line with her and help her stay calm.

"Then she told me that they were planning on killing her," Enright said. Allegedly the "they" Kelly had referred to were Christine and Ronald Lyons and Christine's ex-husband, Peter Arthur. Kelly had long suspected the three of wanting to kill her so that they could take her children away. "She told me that she overheard them...they were arguing about how they were going to do it," continued Enfield. "Toward the end, she said 'they're here now' and that's when they've gone in and I heard...and then she's muffled," Right after that, according to Enfield, she heard Kelly make "a funny noise," and then the call disconnected. Three weeks later Kelly was found dead in a dry creek bed. Police said she had been bludgeoned to death.

Hearing someone suffer - and even die - over the phone is, unfortunately, part of the job for 911 operators. Training and experience don't make this aspect of the job any easier, and emergency operators are regularly exposed to frightening situations - all over the phone.

In 2014, a Denver 911 operator was on the phone for 12 minutes trying to get help to a woman whose husband was trying to murder her. The caller identified herself as Kristine Kirk, and said that she was terrified of what her husband, Richard Kirk, was doing in the couple's home. Kristine told the operator that her husband had started rambling on about how the end of the world was coming, and that he wanted her to shoot him. She told the operator that he was hallucinating and that the couple's three young children were frightened. The operator asked Kristine if there was a gun in the house, and she said there was, but that it was locked in a safe.

Immediately following that statement, the operator heard scuffling over the line, then screams and gunshots. According to the operator, "the victim was not heard again." Police finally arrived to the home and discovered that Kristine Kirk had been shot and killed. Her husband later confessed to the crime.

Identity theft is an all too common problem. If it hasn't happened to you, you probably know someone who had their credit card used by an imposter. While this can certainly be an annoyance, it pales in comparison to more extreme cases of identity theft - ones that involve kidnapping, mysterious disappearances, and even unidentified murder victims.

Unsolved mysteries involving stolen identities and unidentified bodies give Hollywood thrillers a run for their money. Consider the case of Joseph Newton Chandler, a fraudster so careful that some assume he was fleeing some terrible past crime. Or Elaine Parent, whose murderous tendencies earned her the nickname "The Chameleon Killer." And then there are cases of people who have simply disappeared. Had they died, as authorities assumed? Or were they secretly living somewhere else, under new identities?

These unsolved crimes are enough to puzzle any armchair detective. More outrageous than any fiction, here are some of the most fascinating and strangest mysteries involving stolen or assumed identities.

Elaine Parent, "The Chameleon Killer," was a con woman who killed her roommate Beverly McGowan in 1990. McGowan was found on a canal bank in southern Florida, her head and hands removed by chainsaw, and her stomach tattoo sliced from her torso. Parent had moved in with McGowan just 72 hours prior to the murder, under the guise that she was an English employee of IBM.

In truth, Parent was born in the Bronx in 1942. She quickly fled to Britain after McGowan's murder, purchasing the plane ticket with her victim's credit card. Over the next 12 years, Parent was pursued by UK and American authorities; she was spotted in London, Paris, Turkey, Australia, and South Africa along the way. 

Parent used over 20 different aliases and hid out with a variety of lovers in Europe and the U.S. In 1998, she taunted Florida authorities by mailing them an oil painting of herself, with the words "Best wishes: your Chameleon" typed on the back. 

When law enforcement finally closed in on Parent in 2002, she fatally shot herself. An advanced, psychopathic criminal, she's believed to have killed several victims, though her body count remains a mystery to this day. 

In 2011, Russian ex-surgeon Dmitriy Yakovlev was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the murders of Irina Malezhik and Viktor Alekseyev. Yakovlev had lived and worked in New Jersey and knew both of his victims. The crimes themselves were brutal: Yakovlev left a trail of dismembered body parts - along with a really creepy Dracula mask - that were discovered in 2006 in the New Jersey woods. 

Yakovlev's motive was clear. After the murders, he immediately began using his victim's identities, going on lavish shopping sprees with his wife using the deceaseds' credit cards. But that's not a smart way to get away with murder, and Yakovlev was caught pretty quickly.

Authorities suspect that the serial killer was also involved in the 2003 disappearance of former NYPD mechanic Michael Klein. An associate of Yakovlev had purchased a home from Klein, and shortly thereafter he vanished without a trace. However, Yakovlev wasn't charged with the crime.

On September 15, 2001, a young man checked into an Amanda Park, WA, motel under the name Lyle Stevik. He paid in cash and offered no ID. He was seen hanging around the motel for a couple of days, but by all accounts he kept to himself. Three days into his stay, a maid entered Stevik's room and found him kneeling in the room's closet. She assumed he had been praying, and asked the motel's owner to check on him. When the owner entered, he got a clearer view: Stevik had hung himself with his belt on the closet's cross bar.

Stevik left behind some clothes, cash for the room, and a note that simply read "SUICIDE." It was a strange scene for sure, and some have speculated it was a murder. To make the situation even odder, no one has ever found a record of a Lyle Stevik.

The 2012 documentary The Imposter tells the story of the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay, a 13-year-old Texas boy who left home on his bike one day and turned up in Spain three years later. Except, as the film's title suggests, it wasn't really him.

Barclay did leave his home in San Antonio on June 13, 1994, but he was never seen again. When The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a call from Spain in 1997 saying a boy showed up at a shelter claiming to have escaped a sex ring, they thought a miraculous recovery had been made. But the boy claiming to be the 16-year-old Barclay was actually 23-year-old Frederic Bourdin, a French con artist.

The fact that Bourdin wasn't Barclay seemed obvious. He looked nothing like the missing boy and had a French accent. Still, the Barclay family took him in for six months before the ruse was uncovered. Why Bourdin did this is unclear, but why the family went along with it could be much more sinister. Bourdin has since claimed that the family killed Barclay and buried him on the property. Coming from a pathological liar, this accusation should come with an Everest-sized grain of salt, but it does make an eerie amount of sense. 

Franklin Delano Floyd has been on death row in Florida since 2002 for the 1989 murder of dancer Cheryl Commesso. In 2014, Floyd finally confessed to another crime he had long been suspected of: the murder of his stepson, Michael Anthony Hughes.

Floyd married Michael Hughes's mother, a woman then known as Tonya Hughes, in 1989. Tonya died in a hit-and-run in 1990 and Floyd abandoned Michael. He became a ward of the state and was placed in foster care. In 1994, Floyd decided he wanted custody of Michael, but the state refused to grant it - Floyd was not Michael's biological father and they had severe doubts about his ability to take care of Michael. So, Floyd kidnapped Michael from his elementary school. Floyd was caught, but there was no trace of Michael. In 1995, Floyd was convicted on charges related to the kidnapping and sentenced to 52 years in prison. Despite this, Floyd maintained for years that Michael was alive and well.

But when Floyd confessed to murdering Michael, he also shed some light on Tonya. Tonya Hughes's real name was Suzanne Marie Sevakis. Floyd was married to Sevakis's mother in 1975. When Sevakis's mother went to jail for a petty crime - she served only 30 days - Floyd took off with Sevakis. She was six years old at the time. Floyd and Sevakis lived on the run for the rest of her life. They married in 1989 before she died in 1990. Floyd is also considered a suspect in Sevakis's death.

The disappearance of Maura Murray has perplexed authorities and fascinated countless amateur sleuths. The University of Massachusetts student crashed her car on a desolate New Hampshire road on February 9, 2004, and seemingly disappeared into thin air. With no footprints left in the snow, it's widely believed that she got in someone's car near the site of the crash. 

While Murray's family believes the 21-year-old was abducted against her will, an alternative theory has emerged that paints a different picture. Prior to her disappearance, Murray had run into some legal problems related to possessing stolen credit card numbers, and she had been previously been asked to leave West Point due to honor code violations. She also emailed her professors prior to her disappearance to notify them she would be gone for a while. There's also the fact that no one knows what she was doing in New Hampshire. 

Did Murray walk away from her own life? Is she currently living under an assumed identity? There have been several claimed sightings of the missing woman in Canada, and there's speculation shes's since had a Facebook account (now removed). She could be alive and well, with a completely different identity.

In July of 2002, Joseph Newton Chandler put a gun in his mouth and squeezed the trigger. The Eastlake, OH, man had been battling colon cancer and decided enough was enough. It's a sad, if not uncommon story, save for one detail - it wasn't the first time he had died. 

The real Chandler, an eight-year-old boy, had previously died in a car crash in Texas in 1945. The man who claimed his identity did so in 1978 by filing for a social security card in South Dakota. He then moved to California, and later Cleveland.

After his death, the faux Chandler left little behind other than $82,000 in the bank, leading authorities to believe he was some sort of fugitive. Some amateur detectives have even painted Chandler as possibly being the Zodiac Killer, though the connection is based on nothing more than conjecture. His true identity remains a mystery.

Imagine that you become the unwitting victim of identity theft beginning at 11 years old. At age 19, when you go to rent your first apartment, you learn that your FICO number looks more like a decent bowling score. You then request a copy of your credit report, and see that you're $500,000 in debt. A nightmare, right? Now imagine that the culprit behind this is your own mother. 

For Axton Betz-Hamilton, that surreal case of fraud was a reality. Now an assistant professor of consumer studies at Eastern Illinois University, Betz-Hamilton is an expert on child identity theft, largely inspired by her own horror story. After her mother Pam Elliott's 2013 death, her father discovered a credit card statement that revealed she had been stealing her daughter's identity for decades. The clues Elliott left behind suggested she led a double life and likely owned additional property, but all of the money appears to have vanished.

Unable to ask her mother why she would do this, Betz-Hamilton has theorized that Elliott was a "low-grade psychopath."

On Christmas Eve of 2010, Lori Erica Ruff committed suicide in the driveway of her Texas home. The wife and mother had become increasingly erratic in the months leading up to her death, and she was facing divorce proceedings that seemed to have broken her. It was a tragic ending, and it would ultimately leave many more questions than answers. 

After Lori's funeral, widower Blake Ruff opened a lockbox that his wife had previously forbidden him from touching. In it he found an Idaho ID with Lori's image, but bearing the name Becky Sue Turner. It came with a matching birth certificate. A private investigator later discovered that Becky Sue Turner had died at two years old in the state of Washington. 

Soon, everything Blake knew about his late wife unraveled. Her upbringing in Arizona proved false, and the authorities got involved in an effort to learn the women's true identity. Was she hiding from some terrible crime? Just who was Lori Erica Ruff? The official investigation never uncovered the truth.

Dr. Sneha Anne Philip left her New York City apartment on September 10, 2001, and was never seen again. On the morning of September 11, her husband Ron Lieberman had still not heard from her, but he wasn't worried; it was not unlike Philip to spend the night with family. But when the terror attacks happened, and he could still not reach his wife, he began to fear the worst. 

Lieberman hired a private investigator, and the two later concluded that Philip had likely rushed to the World Trade Center to assist with any victims. It's an altruistic and tragic death that Lieberman painted, but it may have been far from the truth.

In reality, the two had been having marital problems. Reported to have taken on a serious drinking habit, Philip seemed to be avoiding her husband at all costs. Though she was officially ruled dead in 2008, nothing has ever tied her to the tower attacks, and some speculate that she used the tragedy as an opportunity to start a new life.

Sun, fun, adventure, booze, and all the food you desire. No one can dispute the fact that some time on a cruise ship can lead to some relaxing getaways and many fond memories. However, cruise ships have secrets that can be dangerous and even downright deadly. From the early 1900s to the 21st century, there have been a plethora of ominous disappearances of cruise ships, as well as scary crimes and suicides in the midst of the opulent splendor of seafaring adventures. 

Compiled here is a list of true stories of terrible things that happened while people were at sea. In the middle of what should have been a relaxing vacation awaited tragedy and horror. From liaisons gone bad to assaults, read on for information on the most frightening crimes committed on cruise ships.

Alicia Keir boarded the Carnival Dream cruise ship on her way to Saint Maarten in October of 2011. She was pregnant, but kept it a secret from her friends and family, possibly because she had had multiple unprotected sex partners in a relatively short period of time and didn't know who the father was.

Two days into the cruise, Keir realized she was giving birth. She did not get help and instead, delivered the baby on her own. She gave birth to a healthy, breathing baby girl, wrapper her in a towel, and hid her under one of the beds in the cabin. The child died of exposure and neglect while Keir continued to enjoy her trip. Once the ship docked in St. Maarten, a cleaning crew discovered the deceased infant and alerted authorities. After pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter four years after the fact, Alicia was sentenced to one day behind bars, including time served.

Darla and Enoch had planned a luxury cruise to commemorate Enoch’s birthday in 2009, and brought along their 14-year-old daughter, Taylor, to celebrate. The trip aboard the cruise ship Freedom was enjoyable, but one night during the cruise, Taylor was unable to sleep and went to an upper deck to write in her journal. It was then that the ship bartender, Heri Krispiyanto of Indonesia, dragged the girl into an employees only area and forced himself on her.

After an admonition to tell no one, Krispiyanto let the terrified girl return to her family. As is the case with so many victims of sexual assault, Taylor couldn’t bring herself to tell her family, and their vacation continued. It wasn’t until months later that the depression and trauma forced her to reveal that she’d been raped by the bartender who had become well acquainted with the family during their stay.

At first, Krispiyanto denied the allegations altogether, but after failing a lie detector test, he admitted to having sex with the girl and claimed it was consensual. Since Taylor was too young to even offer consent, Krispiyanto was tried for rape and sentenced to three years behind bars. 

Eric Dickerson was aboard the Carnival Sensation, headed out to the Bahamas for a four-day cruise with his wife when the two of them complained of the noise coming from the next cabin. Dickerson and his wife were moved to another cabin, but allowed to keep the keys to the first one. At some point, Dickerson ended up partying with a group of teenage boys and two teenage girls.

Unable to get alcohol on their own, Dickerson admitted to purchasing alcohol for the minors in the original room he’d had with his wife. After allowing the teens to consume alcohol in his presence, Eric Dickerson forced himself onto one of the girls as the second of the two underage girls was held in a bathroom by one of the boys. After assaulting her, Dickerson then directed the other young men to act accordingly. They took turns assaulting the victim. Once done, Dickerson allowed the young women to leave. A rape kit was done, and Dickerson was arrested by the F.B.I. in Florida. Dickerson has since been sentenced to 20 years in prison and another 15 years on probation.

O’Neil Persaud was staying at an all-inclusive resort on the island of St. Maarten in the Bahamas. He was travelling alone and was supposed to have flown back to Toronto at the end of his holiday. He had no concrete reason to be aboard the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s Adventure of The Seas on the evening of July 19, 2002.

The idea that the 31-year-old Guyanese-Canadian citizen would die on a cruise ship he had no reason to be on is strange. The events surrounding his death are stranger still. Persaud was seen on video boarding the ship at St. Maarten in the company of a woman in a white hat who appeared to be Persaud’s companion. It wasn’t until Persaud approached a crew member asking for food and a room that he was apprehended and placed in an isolation cell.

Shortly after, Persaud was forcibly restrained. He became violent and suicidal after being placed in confinement, and walked through three security guards and two cans of pepper spray before he was restrained by another five men and sedated. He was pronounced dead shortly after. No other drugs were found in his system. His death was ruled accidental, but Persaud's family maintains that he was murdered.

Tammy Grogan took a sorely needed vacation aboard the Imagination of Carnival Cruise Lines in September of 2006. She was traveling with her 14-year-old son, her sister, and her mother on a four-day cruise to Mexico. One day, Grogan was nowhere to be found, but her group assumed she was aboard the ship enjoying the day. It was only when they docked that they realized something was wrong. She had been missing for 36 hours. 

Investigations led to the revelation that the cruise had been paid for by a Craig Morgan. Morgan was under suspicion for having a "touchy-feely" relationship with Grogan's young son, Jimmy Fleischmann. Grogan forbid her son from meeting the older man, and when Morgan gave them the tickets to the cruise, she accepted despite her suspicion. Morgan himself was not on the cruise, but investigators discovered that a date rape drug was in one of Grogan's last-known drinks. Grogan's mother suspects foul play, but her daughter’s disappearance officially remains an unsolved mystery. 

Scott Roston and Karen Waltz impulsively got married in Las Vegas in February, 1988. The news came as a surprise to Karen’s roommate and worried her mother, who didn’t trust Roston, and thought the two were moving too fast. Misgivings aside, the newlyweds boarded the Sundance Cruises luxury ship and embarked on their honeymoon.

Nine days after their wedding, Karen Waltz went overboard and drowned. Fellow passengers recounted that the couple had argued on board, with Roston intimidating his wife on several occasions. Roston had grown angry when he saw Karen eating sweets, and had been furious with her for eating with the wrong utensils. Roston first claimed she had been swept overboard by a strong wind, but wind velocity had been no more than five miles per hour at the time.

Forensic evidence indicated Karen had been the victim of violence, including damage to her neck consistent with strangling, and cuts and scratches to Roston’s face indicative of a desperate struggle. Roston changed his story once this information came to light, and claimed that they had been attacked by Israeli assassins. Yes. Assassins. He further stated that he was knocked unconscious before they killed her. Roston was sentenced to life in federal prison for Karen’s murder, and the sentence was reduced to thirty three years on appeal. 

Schoolteacher Robert McGill and his wife, Shirley, had been high school sweethearts who decided to break up and move on. 30 years later, during a high school reunion, the two got together again and married in what seemed like a love story for the ages. The story brutally ended in July of 2009 aboard the cruise ship Elation, on a five-day cruise to Mexico for McGill's 55th birthday.

McGill had been drinking heavily the night before in Cabo San Lucas, and the drinking continued on the ship. Court documents say McGill downed at least 20 drinks in the interim and was so drunk he could barely walk. McGill claims to have no recollection of the murder and doesn't know what triggered him, but he brutally beat his wife after returning to his cabin. He then strangled her and left her broken body on the floor of the bathroom as he calmly changed clothes and went up to one of the decks to smoke a cigar.

Later, he met another couple for more drinks, and when asked where Shirley McGill was, he confessed to having killed her. McGill was taken into custody when the ship docked in Los Angeles and was sentenced to life in prison. 

Newly weds John Banner and his wife, Darla Mellinger-Banner, were both found dead in a blood-soaked cabin during their second cruise in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on April 2, 2015. Upon investigation, it was determined that Banner had stabbed his wife to death and then taken his own life with the same weapon. Oddly enough, police had been summoned to the couple’s home in Ohio shortly after they returned from their first honeymoon cruise a scant five months earlier in December of 2014.

In the 2014 encounter, the wife had sustained a stab wound to the center of her chest from the husband. The couple explained that it had occurred when the husband went to show his wife an old military dagger and tripped on a rug. The explanation, while dubious, seemed plausible enough and was corroborated by both Banner and Mellinger-Banner, and no further action had been taken at the time.

On September 24, 2002, emergency paramedics were called to cabin D182 on a P&O cruise ship bound for Noumea and other Pacific ports of call. In the bathroom of the cabin lay Dianne Brimble, unconscious, and lying in her own excretion. Half an hour later, Brimble was pronounced dead. An autopsy later revealed that she died over alcohol and drug overdose. 

The cabin in which she was found in belonged to the four men that witnesses claimed they saw Brimble with the night before at the on-ship nightclub. The men had boarded the ship with the intention to cram as much sex into the ten days and nine nights they had at sea. They were accused of harassing and offering drugs to multiple women on the ship, including teenage girls.

After the victim’s body was removed, the men launched racist, sexist tirades against Brimble for having ruined their vacation. Ultimately, the men were cleared of most of the charges including manslaughter. One of them even pleaded guilty to the vastly lesser charge of giving Brimble GHB, also known as the “date rape drug” before she died. The judge opted for no punishment in the case. 

George Smith IV had been married just days before he and his wife, Jennifer Hagel, boarded the MS Brilliance of the Seas in July of 2005. They were enjoying their trip until a very drunk Smith apparently left the casino early that morning in the company of several young men. After what has described as “very loud arguing” and the “sound of furniture being moved” in Smith’s room, he was gone, with nothing but a bloody smear twenty feet below his cabin to mark his passage.

Smith, who was very wealthy, had apparently bragged of having $50,000 in his cabin. The four men he was last seen with claimed they put him to bed and left. In 2015, the FBI announced they would be closing the case. Devastated, Smith’s family maintains he was murdered and still seeks justice. Hagel has since remarried. 

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has a fascinating history. From its founding in the 1820s by Joseph Smith to the its modern-day prevalence in Utah, the religion continues to intrigue believers and skeptics alike. Aspects of Mormonism are shrouded in mystery to outsiders - but would you believe that there are rumored ties between the mob and the LDS church?

Before your imagination goes into overdrive, know that the Mormon church isn't rife with organized crime. True, there are bizarre tales of Mormons and Howard Hughes; the eccentric billionaire's business holdings were controlled by the so-called "Mormon Mafia." And then there's the religion's roots in Las Vegas - Mormons built the first permanent settlements in the area, and were largely responsible for creating its mega casinos. But for all its ties to Sin City, the Mormon Church is actually as anti-mob as you can get.

The Mormon contingent was still relatively small in 1954, when the Mormon-dominated Continental Bank of Salt Lake City opened the Bank of Las Vegas. E. Parry Thomas, a Mormon-connected financial manager employed by Continental in Utah, was sent to run the new institution.

Thomas was the first banker to begin lending to casino operators. Whether these operators were actually criminals or not, they had an unsavory reputation due to their connections with gambling. When asked about the risk involved in dealing with such clientele, Thomas responded, "I’m in the banking business, and these people were good loans."

This decision lead to an increase in the size and number of Las Vegas casinos. Thomas also fought to change rulings to allow for corporate ownership of casinos. That meant the Securities and Exchange Commission would oversee the casinos, ensuring that any mobsters could no longer use them as fronts.

In 1905, the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad bought much of the property around the small town of Las Vegas. The rural settlement began flourishing thanks to the railway, and Mormons returned to the region. They set up homes in nearby Bunkerville, Mesquite, St. Thomas, and Overton, and eventually gravitated to Las Vegas, too. By 1930, they comprised almost ten percent of the Las Vegas population.

Mormons erected the first permanent settlement in Las Vegas. In 1855, they were sent by Brigham Young to establish an outpost halfway between Mormon missions in San Bernardino and Southern California. These representatives were also ordered to convert Paiute Native-Americans in the region.

However, the Mormon's first attempt to settle the region failed. Between failed crops and disagreements among group leadership, the settlement soon folded; the Mormons abandoned the fort by 1857.

E. Parry Thomas did more than arrange lucrative real estate deals. He also spearheaded a change in Nevada state law to allow corporations to own and operate casinos.

Up until the '60s, only individuals could be licensed to own or operate a casino. This was meant to identify exactly who was involved in ownership of a casino, and theoretically eliminate criminals and other undesirables from the industry. Unfortunately, the mob hired clean front men who merely concealed more sinister backers.

Thomas knew that corporate ownership would not only greatly increase the growth of the city, it would introduce the scrutiny of the SEC and further weed out underworld influence. The new law had massive repercussions for the city; as one historian put it, "Without it, Vegas would still be in the dark ages."

By the mid-'60s, Las Vegas was heavily influenced by individuals who were either members of, or associated with, the American mafia. Although Mormon businessmen had encouraged the growth of the sometimes-shady gambling business, they were concerned about the city's image. The solution: sell the mob-owned casinos to someone clean, like Howard Hughes.

Hughes's impromptu visit and casino buying spree was enabled by E. Parry Thomas, who officially acted as the buyer so that Hughes would not be gouged on the purchase prices and his involvement could remain a secret. By the time Hughes's identity as a major holder of Nevada casinos became public, the billionaire already owned over a dozen properties.

For more proof of the Mormon Church's power in Las Vegas, just look to politics. Berkley Bunker was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1940 to fill a vacancy caused by the death of the office holder. Bunker, a native of Clark County, in which Las Vegas is situated, was the former speaker of the Nevada State Assembly and the first Mormon Senator from Nevada. More recently, Harry Reid represented Nevada in Washington DC.

Mormon politicians from Nevada tend to be conservative, and typically hold their offices for a long time.

In the 1940s and '50s, the mafia ran Las Vegas. Then, in the 1960s, Howard Hughes came to town. Hughes was a billionaire, a film producer, and an aviator. And, towards the end of his life, he was also an increasingly unwell man prone to erratic tendencies.

On Thanksgiving weekend in 1966, Hughes arrived in Las Vegas by train and took up residence at the Desert Inn. He stayed there for a month, never leaving his room, until the owner threatened to kick him out. In response, Hughes bought the hotel and continued to hole up on the top floor. From there, he bought up Vegas casinos left and right, snatching them from the mob. And, since Hughes refused to leave the Desert Inn, he had a team of executive assistants and advisors to oversee his business dealings. They were led by a man named Frank "Bill" Gay, a Mormon Hughes hired right out of UCLA. Like Gay, everyone on the team was Mormon. Together, they became known as the "Mormon Mafia."

Why Mormons? Hughes liked them because they didn't drink, smoke, or gamble, which meant that he could trust them not to succumb to the vices of Las Vegas and handle his business with discretion and integrity. 

In the late 1960s, Steve Wynn was a small-time investor in real estate and a minority owner of the Frontier Hotel. E. Parry Thomas became a mentor to Wynn, and helped him acquire his first big Vegas property, the downtown Golden Nugget Casino.

Wynn went on to acquire or build many of the city's most prominent casinos, including The Mirage, Bellagio, and Treasure Island. He remains one of the most successful and high-profile figures in the international gambling industry.

Traditionally, Mormons have opposed gambling as acquiring "money from the person who may be possessed of it without giving value received in return." But that hasn't prevented Mormons from helping turn Las Vegas into the largest gaming operation in the United States. In fact, many Mormons work in casinos in Las Vegas; the Church's stance seems to be "don't touch the dice."

Most of you have no doubt experienced the underage drinking rite-of-passage that is Boone's Farm, Mad Dog 20/20, or other prison wine-esque atrocities; those unforgettable elixirs that taste as if they've been vomited up, run through a strainer, and re-bottled.  But how do actual prisoners make wine, when getting a hold of the real thing is out of the question? Is someone smuggling ingredients in to them? Or are they simply brilliantly (and grotesquely) improvising, as only the truly bereft can?

On the other hand, what if you aren't in prison, but really want drugs or alcohol and can't get your hands on them, for whatever reason? (Sharia Law, for instance). Are DIY drugs truly, mind-alteringly legit? Can you actually go online and purchase mushroom spores or plant seeds that, once harvested, will admit you through the jungly, ivy-thick doors of perception? 

Making booze out of ketchup and sugar packets, bloated bacteria colonies, and even one's own crotch isn't easy, or anything you should probably ever consider doing, no matter how hard up you are. Unless, of course, you want to know how to make toilet wine so you can open your own Boutique Brooklyn (or Silverlake) watering hole, where thirsty regulars can drink wine directly from toilets while Tweeting about how authentic the experience is. 

Read on to find out more than you ever wanted to know about DIY alcohol so nasty it's more like a weapon, and various other homemade drug "solutions" that have altered everyone from bored suburban kids to ISIS militants. 

Pruno (also called hooch), Mad Dog's far uglier and more gut-curdling cousin, may never see the lush rolling hills of Napa Valley wine country, but it's definitely caused plenty of rolling hills of nausea in prisons and jails all over the world. All you need is a resealable bag, some peeled oranges, a can of fruit cocktail, a bunch of sugar cubes, some ketchup packets, and tap water, all squeezed into a paste, packed in the bag, and stored "someplace dark."

What's this process like? The Modern Drunkard's Hank Soboski sums it up like this: "I unwrapped the towels to discover [the bag] had ballooned up nicely ... this, I surmised, was due to the gasses given off by the fermentation process ...  by day five, it looked as if my baby was thinking about exploding into something I didn't care to clean up."

What was the final product like? "Aside from tasting like moldy and rotted fruit, it tingled against my tongue as vast bacteria colonies rose up and counter-attacked.To put it bluntly, classic Pruno tastes like a bottle of Thunderbird filtered through a dumpster full of rotted garbage."

Never let it be said that fortune favors the mold.

Can't stomach prison hooch? You might not have to. This piece details how some Massachusetts inmates found an ingeniously subtle way of acquiring real booze.

Using connections on the outside (specifically, a friend who worked in the bottling plant that supplied their jail with soft drinks), said inmates arranged to have the soda removed from cans and replaced with alcohol via hypodermic needle. After the booze was squirted in, the tiny puncture wounds were sealed with superglue, and prison officials were none the wiser.

Rumpelstiltskin may have been able to spin straw into gold, and Jesus perhaps turned water into wine, but today's scientists have one-up on both of them. According to reports, chemists are fast figuring out how to turn "ordinary brewers yeast into a fermentation machine that could transform sugar into our most widely prescribed painkillers, not to mention heroin."

Too easy to be true, you might claim? Maybe. The process is still in its infancy as of 2017, and thus far, its distillation methods have produced quantities of opiates too small to alter any pain levels, or minds. Nevertheless, wary researchers are predicting that one day, DIY painkillers might be giving the pharmaceutical industry a serious run for its corruption.

In Saudi Arabia, where alcohol is banned, you really have to go out of your way to find anything intoxicating. And that means anything, up to and including cosmetics and mouthwash, the alcoholic versions of which are prohibited in the country. 

One would assume such restrictions would generate a thriving and diverse black market, and perhaps they do (although Saudi officials really like cutting people's heads off, so it's probably a market to avoid). Captagon is often used in place of drugs and alcohol for a buzz; it's a now-recalled amphetamine ... marketed under the generic name fenethylline ... that was originally used as a treatment for depression and narcolepsy. The drug can be synthesized in a variety of ways, and it's imported to (and manufactured in) the Middle East in vast quantities.

This variation on bathtub crank is all the rage. As this article puts it, “Like crystal meth, [it] can be produced extremely cheaply almost anywhere, even using materials which can be bought over the counter." 

Young people use the drug as a stimulant, and to aid with weight loss. The article states, "Obesity has risen in Saudi Arabia in recent years, and body image has become more important. Socializing also often goes on late into the night, but young Saudis are still expected to present themselves at school or university very early in the morning." (It must be working, because a whopping 30% of worldwide illegal amphetamine seizures in 2013 were in Saudi Arabia). 

Captagon is also commonly referred to as the "jihad pill," and is supposedly used by ISIS militants to keep them cranked up and ready for battle. (A Newsweek article from May 2017 discusses cases of hundreds of thousands of doses of Captogon being seized in Europe, en route to ISIS). 

You might not think you'd find an article on making drugs in the Tech Insider section of Business Insider. Yet there it is, in all its glory, offering plenty of solutions for those on the hunt for DIY ways to get high. 

The piece details alternative ways of producing mushrooms and mescaline. (The cactus the latter is derived from, San Pedro, or Echinopsis pachanoi, can be purchased online; you can even get a powdered version of the plant). The legality of San Pedro is a bit difficult to pin down, however. According to an article in The Desert Sun newspaper, it's legal to own as a decorative plant, but illegal to extract mescaline from as of 2015. 

As for mushrooms, psychedelic varieties are illegal, but you can always purchase spores for such fungus through various online retailers and grow them yourself. 

Waste not, want not. That's the philosophy of some enterprising meth addicts, who believe that one addict's pee is another addict's second chance at a fix. In other words, urine extraction labs are very much a thing: some people "drink the meth-tainted urine to get high, while others use the cooking process to filter the drug back out," according to reports.

It's sad, to be sure, but it doesn't get more DIY than that. To turn the famous Frank Zappa lyric around, "watch out where the huskies go/and don't you smoke that yellow snow."

Products (intoxicating or not) made with human body fluids aren't unheard of. In 2011, for example, British ice cream makers made headlines when they tried to launch Baby Gaga, a product crafted from meticulously screened breast milk.

In 2016, a Polish brewery decided to take it a step further by attempting to fund a beer derived from vaginal yeast. "Yoni" is the Sanskrit term for vagina, and the company in question, The Order of Yoni, sought to germinate their DIY product, Bottled Instinct, from the loins of Czech model Alexandra Brendlova, pictured above with the beer. (“We selected a beautiful, very intelligent woman for our first beer, and she personifies beauty, intelligence and will be an inspiration for our future models," a spokesperson said).

That's all well and good, but beer brewed in someone's crotch is still a pretty universally unappetizing proposition. Besides, Yoni has already been beaten to the punch: way back in 2005, a bold entrepreneur named Toi Sennhauser introduced that year's Oktoberfest to Original Pussy Beer, a brew developed in her very own "little oven," to quote Divine from Pink Flamingos. 

Toilet wine is essentially the same thing as Pruno. Its only unique factor is the bag into which you smash your ingredients, which is stored in a toilet (a "cool, dark place” that serves the dual purpose of containing the noxious mixture in the event of a "gas" explosion). 

Botulism is a concern with Pruno: the Center for Disease Control and Prevention noted toilet-wine associated outbreaks of the condition in 2004, 2005, and 2012. In each case, it was assumed that bad potatoes were to blame: one prison involved in these statistics went so far as to ban spuds from its kitchens to prevent future incidents. 

There are industry standards, no matter how harrowing the endeavor in question might be. Drug mules, for example, at least empty their colons before putting their stashes up in them, for practical purposes as much as sanitary ones. But when you're dealing with jenkem, described by this article as an inhalant used in very poor parts of the world ... and in the New York prison system ... as a cheap high, all bets are off.  

Author and former prisoner Daniel Ginis describes the substance thus: "To make it takes guts -- literally. You just need a bottle to fill with piss and sh*t, time to let it ferment and methane gas to form, and the courage to inhale it."

No word on what kind of high this produces, but it's obviously not great, because jenkem use and production are rare. "While I did watch a mentally ill man collect the raw materials for jenkem in a dormitory once, it was certainly not a common sight," Ginis writes, apparently by way of reassurance.

A crack stick might strike you as a variation of street pixie-stick, or as something requiring complex materials, a basic knowledge of "cooking" techniques, a lot of Pyrex, and a funnel. But none of the above would be true. Crack sticks ... an enterprising way to get blizted out of your skull in prison ... don't actually contain crack at all, and they require very few ingredients. 

An article published in The Daily Mail in 2016 detailed the undercover experience of two journalists who spent months in an American prison. During this time, they witnessed the smoking of the sticks, which are nothing more than crushed up e-cigarette filters wrapped in coffee-soaked toilet paper. (In case you're wondering, the headline of the article is "'Crack Stick' Cooked Up in Cells, Attacks Over Hash Browns, and Rampant Gay Sex").

John Lynch, also known by his pseudonym, John Dunleavy, was one of several well-known Australian serial killers. He went down in history as the Berrima Axe Murderer, due his weapon of choice - a tomahawk. Few serial killers are axe murderers, as it requires that they get very close to the victim to deliver the final blow. However, Lynch had the habit of sneaking up on his targets from behind, giving them little chance to fight back. 

Lynch was born in Ireland in 1813. In the early 1830s, he was found guilty of a crime and sent to Australia as punishment. At the time, Australia was like a penal colony where convicts were sent to do hard labor. There, Lynch eventually joined the ranks of Bushrangers, who were the criminals and murderers prowling around Australia's outback. He was found guilty of serial murder in 1841 and was hung on April 22, 1842. 

In 1835, Lynch and several other men were put on trial for the murder of Thomas Smith. Smith had apparently witnessed the men committing a number of crimes and told law enforcement about them. He was found dead shortly thereafter, made to be an "example" of people who snitched. Lynch and his criminal gang admitted to the murders. Despite his confession, Lynch was somehow acquitted of the crime. However, his two cohorts were sentenced to death and hung. 

John Lynch apparently carried his tomahawk with him everywhere. Although a gun would have been a safer weapon to have on hand in the Australian outback, Lynch carried an axe. He used the same tomahawk to kill all nine of his known victims, as well as any others that he wasn't charged with murdering. This earned him the nickname, "Berrima Axe Murderer."

On February 19, 1841, a man noticed that a dingo was madly digging at some shrubs near the road. Upon closer inspection, he found the dead body of Kearns Landregan, who was last seen alive with John Lynch (though he was known in the area as John Dunleavy). Landregan had been murdered and beaten to death from behind. Lynch was brought in and questioned, found with Landregan's hat, and then charged with Landregan's murder. The rest of his crimes unraveled from there. 

The patriarch of the Mulligan family was a known fencer of stolen goods. Lynch tried to sell him cattle and other goods at certain points throughout his Australian crime spree, but the two had a falling out. Lynch believed that John Mulligan owed him money, so he went and confronted the man. When Mulligan refused to pay, Lynch killed him and his entire family - Mulligan's wife, Bridget, and their two children, John and Mary. Before Lynch killed Mary, he raped her. Then, he beat them all with his tomahawk before dragging their bodies into a pile and setting them on fire. 

Afterwards, Lynch claimed the Mulligan ranch as his own property. He wrote to the debt holder, claiming that Mulligan sold it to him (presenting himself as John Dunleavy). He stated in a letter that he would be making payments on the property now. This ruse worked for about six months until people grew suspicious of Lynch. 

Although John Lynch was born in Ireland, he spent part of his adult life in Australia. Lynch was convicted of the crime of "false pretenses" and sentenced to seven years of hard labor in Australia when he was 17 years old. He arrived in the land down under in 1832 and began working as a farmhand as part of his sentence. 

The Frazers, a father and son duo, were last seen alive was on August 14, 1841. They were traveling with Lynch when they contacted Samuel Bawtree, the man who had hired them to haul goods through the outback. Shortly afterward, they were never seen or heard from again. Lynch had apparently lured the son into the woods and bashed his head in, then did the same to the father. He hid their bodies, as well as their cart, and took off with the cattle and goods the Frazers had been transporting. 

After Lynch's arrest, he told law enforcement that God had been watching him the entire time that he was committing crimes and that God approved of the murders. On the night before he was executed, Lynch requested that a priest and a local magistrate come to his jail cell. There, he told both of them everything that he had done. 

After serving his seven-year sentence in Australia, the first thing that Lynch did was steal some cattle. He tried to sell them for quick money, but turned down what he felt wasn't a fair price. He decided to take the livestock to Sydney in hopes of securing a more favorable sale.

On the way there, he ran into a man named Edmund Ireland, who was traveling with a young Aboriginal boy. They had a wagonload of goods to sell and were also heading to Sydney. At one point during the journey, Lynch distracted them and killed the boy by smashing the back of his head in with a tomahawk. Later, Ireland shared a similar fate. Lynch hid both of their bodies in some brush and stole their wagon. 

Lynch was charged with the deaths of nine people. He had killed Edmund Ireland, Ireland's traveling companion (the unnamed Aboriginal boy), both of the Frazers, and the Mulligan family. His last victim, Kearns Landregan, was his undoing, as Lynch uncharacteristically left clues in his wake. However, when Lynch gave his confession right before his execution by hanging, he stated that he killed ten people. 

Lynch was supposed to serve as a farmhand in Australia to pay for his crimes in Britain. However, shortly after he arrived, he joined a gang of bushrangers. Bushrangers were criminals who wandered the Australian outback during the 18th and 19th centuries. They usually committed petty crimes and preyed on miners, Aboriginal people, farmers, ranchers, settlers, and just about anyone else who crossed their paths. 

Because of his murdering spree, Lynch is considered one of the most brutal bushrangers. He didn't always resort to cutting down people with his axe - Lynch also had a penchant for stealing valuable goods and fencing them. 

The evolution of crime scene photos begins with pictures taken to identify inmates in the mid-1800s and leads right up to today's modern digital cameras capturing every minute detail of a crime scene. Tracking how crime scene photography has evolved is like going through an image-based tour of crime through the ages. In order to determine exactly how crime scene photography has changed, one first needs to understand the science and methodology behind it, which have become more sophisticated over time.

From Bertillon's grid processing to the use of infrared lighting, forensic photography has changed drastically over the years. Thanks to new technology in crime scene photography, law enforcement officials can take instantaneous pictures of evidence and share clues with other agencies. It has become far harder for the average criminal to escape justice due to these advancements. 

This almost artistic form of mystery solving is a fascinating part of the investigative process. Here is a detailed history of just how far crime scene photography has come.

"Photoshopping" has become a verb in modern society. It's based on the computer program Adobe Photoshop, which allows people to manipulate photos. However, photographers have been editing pictures to create clearer images since the 1870s. Photographer Abner Peeler started airbrushing pictures - essentially using a delicate painting technique to alter pictures - in 1879. By 1893, Charles Burdick had received a patent for the technique.

Early photo manipulation could only really lighten shadows or overlay several pictures taken with different aperture adjustments onto each other to see different details. Of course, early editing techniques were - as they are today - often used to fool the public or satisfy a subject's vanity. But, by and large, these techniques were quite useful to early crime scene photographers in enhancing their pictures for evidence. 

In 1955, German company Kilfitt Optische Fabrik invented the Makro-Kilar lens. This lens attached to a 35 MM camera, and was designed to take large pictures of very small objects. It made it easier to capture small bits of forensic evidence on film. Prior to this, the lenses used could only capture larger pictures and would come out blurry if taken at too close a distance. The Makro-Kilar ushered in the age of macro lenses which are now so universal versions of them can be purchased for cell phone cameras. 

Arthur Fellig, known as "Weegee," is perhaps the most famous crime scene photographer in the world. His nickname is a play on "Ouija board," due to his ability to arrive at crime scenes before police did. In reality, he lived across from a police station and had a radio scanner to hear when things were called in. Weegee's crime scene photos from the 1930s and '40s illustrated the dark side of life in New York City and he inspired forensic photographers across the country. 

Rodolphe A. Reiss (born Archibald A. Reiss) was a German criminologist working around the same time as Bertillon. Reiss expanded on Bertillon's grid method by taking pictures of more than just the immediate crime scene. He photographed every detail in and around the crime scene, from the outside of the building to any visible fingerprints and bits of blood spatter. This set up forensic photography practices that extend to modern day. 

In 1903, the first organized method of photographically documenting a crime scene was invented. The man who created the system was Alphonse Bertillon, a French criminologist. His method involved dividing each room (or scene) into a superimposed grid pattern. He called his system "metric photography."

He would take pictures of each section of the grid in a particular order. Once the photos were developed, Bertillon could place them on a board following the grid that he created. This allowed attorneys and law enforcement to better recreate the scene in court for the judge and jury. Bertillon later gave classes on how to use his system. 

Crime scene photography started with the basic documenting of inmates for identification purposes. These photos helped authorities keep track of who was in the prison system and allowed for police and other photographers to practice taking pictures on what were still primitive cameras. Belgium was the first country to take photos of their inmates, starting in 1843.

The practice spread to Denmark in 1851 and expanded from there. Quite quickly, as photography became more widespread a practice, this led to standardized mugshots and "Wanted" posters. This early introduction to photography in law enforcement expanded to include crime scenes. 

The first crime lab in America was set up in Los Angeles in 1924. August Vollmer, the Chief of Police for the city, wanted a designated place to process forensic evidence including pictures taken at crime scenes. The FBI was a bit behind and didn't have their first crime lab until 1932. The LAPD crime lab was known to be a "cutting edge" facility for many years and the work done there proved that all criminal forensics, including photography, benefited from formalization. 

Due to the popularity of Arthur "Weegee" Fellig's photography, many photographers (some reporters, some freelancers) would hang around police stations waiting for calls to come in. By the 1930s, crime scene photography was being utilized by law enforcement. Certain notorious criminals, like John Dillinger and Al Capone, even enjoyed having their pictures taken by these eager photographers. Police allowed the picture-taking if only because it yielded more pictures of the crime scenes that could then be used in the investigation. 

During the Victorian Period, people documented their recently deceased loved ones by having photographs taken of them. These pictures were a way to show the level of one's grief as well as to create a memento of the person. This practice made photographing the dead less taboo. 

Soon, law enforcement agencies drew from this practice to photograph dead bodies for autopsy photos. One infamous autopsy photo is of John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin. After a manhunt, Booth was cornered and shot to death in a barn. During his autopsy on the USS Montauk, a picture was taken of his body. Although the picture has since been lost, it was a precursor to autopsy pictures as proof of and insight into a criminal or victim's death. 

Although moving pictures were a viable medium from the early 1900s, law enforcement  agencies didn't use the technology for criminal investigative purposes until the 1960s. At that time, film cameras were large and bulky and reliant on switching out spools of film. Although smaller videotape recorders had been invented, it took some time for them to become mainstream with law enforcement agencies. By 1967, these videos were accepted by courts as evidence and were used to supplement still photos.