Weird Shit Blog

Every Monday, the Weird Shit Blog features an unsolved or just generally weird murder, death, or disappearance. This phenomenon is known by people who actually read this shit as Murder Monday. Disclaimer: This one is pretty insane, so be warned if you have delicate sensibilities. And shit.

In our culture, we’re crazy for fucked-up doctors. Take Hannibal Lecter. He’s not even real, but he’s damn scary. Or he was, anyway, until they tried to explain how he got that way. Then it just got stupid. Nazi concentration camp doctors, they were some weird sons of bitches. That one from the Human Centipede, god damn. Medical experimentation and horror and doctors go together like peas in a pod.

Peas of crazy. In a pod of holy shit.

Let me give you a really great example: Where I come from, we have a local legend about a doctor. The story goes that he had this wife he wanted to divorce, but couldn’t because they were Catholic, and back in those days, that was a big no-no. So, instead, he did what any reasonable dude would do: Chained her up in his barn and performed weird experiments on her, slowly cutting off her limbs and parts of her face, then told people she had vanished. Finally, one night, he had some guests staying the night. They heard moaning outside and thought it might be a wounded animal. They found her in the barn, blind, her tongue cut out, and essentially feral. She tried to bite at them when they touched her chains. They called the police and, when she was released, she crawled right back over on her stumps and reattached the chains. She had gotten used to it after having been bound and tortured for so long. The story doesn’t cover the doctor’s fate, but the legend goes that if you visit this farmhouse at night, you can hear moans, the sounds of tools and a power saw, and occasionally see the ghost of a doctor in a blood-spattered white coat.

When I first heard that story, it sent chills up my spine. I mean, fuck, imagine what a deranged doctor could really do to someone?

Now imagine he’s on an island just chock-full of guinea pigs.

But there’s deranged, mutilating doctor crazy, and Carl Tanzler-brand crazy. 

Tanzler was born in 1877 in Dresden, Germany under the name Georg Karl Tanzler. He kicked around Germany for a while growing up, then got out into the world for a bit, even ending up as far away as Australia for a brief time. (It’s speculated that he may have been in prison there.) At various points during his youth, he claimed to have seen a vision of his dead ancestor, Countess Anna Constantia von Cosel. According to his account, she guided him, giving him advice, and once showed him the face of his true love; a dark-skinned and dark-haired woman.

He married in 1920, and in 1926, he emigrated to America, possibly under instruction from the Countess. (He registered his name with immigration authorities as Carl Tanzler von Cosel, and frequently referred to himself as a Count during his time in the U.S.) His wife and two children joined him a year later in Zephyrhills, FL. Shortly thereafter, though, he left them to pursue a career as a radiologist in Key West.

Dick of the Year Award, 1927: Carl Tanzler.

In 1930, Tanzler met the woman of his dreams. Literally. According to him, she was the woman shown to him by his ancestor, and her name was Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos, or “Helen” for short. Her mother had brought her in for a routine examination. Tanzler was enamored with her immediately, and tried to find out all he could about her. He found out that she was married, but had become estranged from her husband after she had a miscarriage. She had been considered a local beauty, and the fact that she hadn’t been snapped back up immediately was seen as a curious thing by Tanzler. If she could have any man she wanted, why wouldn’t she have remarried unless she was waiting for someone like him? (Because that’s totally a logical conclusion.)

Unfortunately, Helen’s examination revealed that she had tuberculosis. Not as big of a deal nowadays, but if you’ve seen any tragic love story films set anywhere from 1700-1945, you know that TB was a fucking death sentence.

“Those? Those are just grains of rice. Just kidding! You’re gonna die.”

Tanzler went to Helen’s family and claimed that he had the means to cure her. He was allowed home visits for months, where he performed various half-assed medical procedures. You know, the kind you do when you’re not really sure what you’re doing but you say you do and her family doesn’t seek real medical treatment because they think you’re giving it to her. That kind. But Tanzler figured he’d seen and heard enough from his fellow medical professionals to know what he was doing.

Kinda like if Hugh Laurie broke into an ER and started telling people what to do, but not as cool.

Tanzler even reportedly confessed his love to her, but it’s never been established that she reciprocated it. Tragically, Helen succumbed to her disease in October of 1931, and Tanzler was devastated. He was so heartbroken that he agreed to pay for her funeral and even bought her a mausoleum, which he visited nightly. Are you sensing the crazy yet? If not, then get ready.

In 1933, two years after Helen’s death, Tanzler broke into the crypt and stole Helen’s corpse.

“I paid for this shit, that makes it pretty much mine, right? Right.”

Why would he do such a thing? Because her ghost told him to, duh! Tanzler claimed that when he visited Helen’s grave every night, her spirit would sing songs with him and occasionally insist that he remove her from his grave and take her to his home. So, when he finally did it, he slapped her in a red toy wagon (seriously) and took her home. When he got her there, he naturally found that the corpse had kinda, you know, decayed. But that didn’t stop Carl Tanzler, no sir. He tied her bones back together with wire and coat hangers, replaced her eyes with glass ones, replaced her skin with wax and plaster of paris, made her a wig out of her own hair, which Tanzler had gotten from her mother after Helen’s death (How the fuck did he even go about asking for that?), and stuffed her chest cavity with rags. He then proceeded to dress her up in fancy clothes and jewelry. Oh, and he kept her in his bed and slept with her.

“Hello, gorgeous. You are looking fantastic tonight.”

In 1940, after 7 fucking years of this, Helen’s sister heard rumors that Tanzler had been sleeping with Helen’s corpse. (What in the fuck? Did he brag about this to other people? Shouldn’t that be something you should, I don’t know, keep to yourself?) She confronted Carl Tanzler and discovered that it was true. She called the police, who immediately came and arrested Tanzler. His story created a sensation, with most newspaper reports casting Tanzler as an eccentric romantic. He was put on trial and charged with “wantonly and maliciously destroying a grave and removing a body without authorization”, which is quite possibly the most insane thing you can stand trial for. (While it was claimed in a 1972 investigation that Tanzler had inserted a cardboard tube into Helen’s vagina to commit necrophilia with her body, it was never mentioned in the medical reports done at e time of his arrest, and it was not implicitly included in the charges.) Carl, however, never stood trial, as it was determined that the statute of limitations had passed for his crime, and he was free to go.

This picture is only to distract you from the gorilla-shit crazy you just read.
…Hey, does that hot dog have a butthole?

Not only did Carl Tanzler never stand trial, he was even awarded U.S. citizenship three years later and wrote an autobiography. In his later years, his estranged wife supported him (what. Just what. No question mark.) Helen was re-buried in an unmarked tomb in secret, so as to prevent Tanzler or others from returning to do more fucked up crap to her. Tanzler was disappointed by this and, using a death mask (Where the hell does he keep getting this shit?) created a wax effigy of Helen that he lived with until his death.

Observe, the labor of total madness.

Sources:
Wikipedia (Robbed the grave of human knowledge long ago)
The Examiner

Every Monday, Weird Shit Blog features mysterious murders, disappearances, crimes, or just weird deaths. I call it Murder Monday. (Even if it’s not a murder. Shut up, it’s my blog and I like alliteration. Alliteration is always awesomely, amazingly appropriate. Asshole.)

The explorers of the early 20th century are the stuff of legends. Dudes in pith helmets, wandering around in jungles and ancient temples, touching stuff, getting cursed. It’s awesome. Some of those guys got turned into characters like Indiana Jones. Some of them were awesome enough that they didn’t have to get fictionalized, like Howard Carter. Those were times of high adventure, when the world was ours to explore. There was always some new vista, just waiting for a dude with a superb moustache and/or monocle to come and stick a flag in it and say, “Fuck you all, I was here first… among white people, I mean.” Nowadays, we don’t really have those unexplored frontiers.

God damn it. At least we’ve still got space. And the ocean, Cthulhu willing.

Percy Fawcett was one such legendary explorer. It ran in his veins. His dad was an explorer before him, and a member of the Royal Geographic Society. His brother was an expert mountain climber and even wrote adventure novels. Percy had plenty of his own accolades, though. He was a surveyor for the Royal Army, where he earned the rank of Colonel and served in World War I, leading an artillery brigade at the age of 50. He also joined the RGS, like his father, and was even a member of the British Secret Service. On top of all that, he was friends with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which is another way of saying “He was friends with one of the baddest motherfuckers to ever walk the planet Earth.”

And he took pictures with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, just to show how cool he was.

He was one of the earliest contemporary explorers of South America. Specifically, he scouted out huge sections of the jungles of Brazil for map-making purposes. He also discovered dozens of species, including some that had been previously assumed to be native legends. Two of his finds have still not been re-discovered: The Mitla, a small creature, around the size of a foxhound, with both cat- and dog-like characteristics, and the Giant Anaconda, which has been apocryphally spotted many times since, but never proven. His Giant Anaconda was supposedly 62 feet long (cue teenagers laughing), and so huge that he couldn’t bring its body back.

Fawcett, unfortunately, was not believed on these two accounts, and while many explorers of those days liked to make shit up, Fawcett’s writings are considered to be genuine today. There’s a very good chance we just haven’t seen them again since (as those jungles are still full of undiscovered animals) or they went extinct.

He made seven successful expeditions of the jungle, often encountering natives and winning their trust by methods that seemed revolutionary at the time: He was nice to them and gave them stuff. Who knew that that kept people from killing you?

“Dear diary, the natives have informed me that they’re not fond of being called ‘brown motherfuckers.’”

But notice how I said “successful” expeditions up there. “That implies he had unsuccessful ones, right?”, you might ask, and you would be correct in that deduction. In 1925, Fawcett set out to find a lost city that he believed existed in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, thanks to funding from a group of financiers called “The Glove.”

Artist’s rendition of “The Glove.”

Fawcett originally heard about the city from a manuscript written by Portuguese explorer João da Silva Guimarães, who claimed to visit the city in 1753. Although Guimarães wrote detailed accounts about the city, he forgot to include, you know, where the fuck it’s actually at and what the fuck it’s called. Fawcett became obsessed with the idea of finding it after first hearing about it in the early 1900s. In fact, the 1925 attempt was not Fawcett’s first to find the city. He had tried twice before. The first expedition couldn’t find it and the second got cancelled due to the outbreak of World War I.  Fawcett dubbed the lost city “Z”.

Many years after his disappearance, a children’s television show discovered the location of Z, just past Y.

Reportedly, Fawcett said before his expedition set forth that, should he go missing, he did not wish for a rescue team to come after him, lest they suffer the same fate. Are you sensing dramatic irony? Because I am.

Fawcett, as has been established, was pretty familiar with the area and how to traverse it. As such, he brought just what he needed and nothing more and kept his party small to keep their noise level low. He finally set out from known areas, after telegraphing his wife, on May 29, 1925. Afterward, neither he, nor his companions, was ever heard from again. Most researchers and subsequent explorers have assumed, probably rightly, that Fawcett was killed by a local, unfriendly tribe, as some of the groups in the area had never even seen white men before. (A fictionalized story similar to this was the basis for the film Cannibal Holocaust.) It’s even suspected that his purposefully limited supplies doomed him in an unexpected way- he may have lost all his gifts for the natives due to an accident while crossing the Amazon.

Another proposed scenario is that Fawcett and his two male companions started a theosophical commune based around the worship of his son.

They should have brought women or something in that case.

And for the theory most likely to be the plot of a comedy from the 1980s, we have some speculation that Fawcett may have gotten some kind of head injury and came to believe that he was the chief of one of the native tribes and took over leadership of them.

The native tribes claim no knowledge of what happened to Fawcett or his companions, and to date, no one has found any sort of remains of any of the three. Though some artifacts have been discovered, so far they have all been found to have been items from Fawcett’s many previous expeditions or things left behind prior to the group’s disappearance.

Oh, and remember what I said earlier about Fawcett warning people not to come try to rescue him? There was a really good reason for that, and it’s probably the most important thing to take from this little tale: Over 100 people have died in the Amazon trying to find out what happened to Percy Fawcett and discover the location of the Lost City of Z.

Sources:
Wikipedia (The Lost Encyclopedia of Horseshit)
BBC.co.uk

If crime shows have taught us anything, it’s that DNA evidence, computer simulations, and cameras with zoom levels higher than a microscope can solve any crime in about a week or so. (Don’t forget snappy one-liners, constant removal and re-placing of sunglasses, and excessive standing around with your hands on your hips.) Even a hard-nosed cop and a series of really, really unlikely events can put away even the most dastardly of crooks.

And so, to fly in the face of that Hollywood tradition, I’m starting a new feature here at the Weird Shit Blog: Murder Mondays. Every Monday, I’ll be featuring unsolved murders, crimes, and deaths from all over the world. (Yes, it’s still Murder Monday even if they’re not technically murders.) Sherlock Holmes, Batman, even motherfucking Robert Stack wouldn’t know what to think of these.

Pictured: Motherfucking Robert Stack, esq.

To set things off, we’re gonna take a look at a death that’s remained unsolved for more than 60 years, and it’s a hell of a case. So put on your deerstalker, blue jeans and white sweater, or (God help you) cheesy sunglasses and leisure suit, and get ready to make some brilliant deductions… or probably not. You know, whatever.

On December 1, 1948, in Adelaide, Australia, a man was found dead on a stretch of beach called Somerton. He appeared to be approximately 40 to 45 years old, average height, average build. In fact, everything about him was pretty average, except that no one knew who the fuck he was. He had no identification, even his dental records didn’t match any known living person in the whole damn country. Weirder still, he had on a suit with a sweater (despite December being summertime in Australia) and no hat, which was apparently uncommon in 1948.

“That’s a bold fashion choice, Tom.” “Go suck a bag of dicks, Bill.”

And even weirder than that, all the tags on his clothes had been removed, making them unidentifiable. The contents of his pockets included cigarettes, matches, a comb, some gum, one used bus ticket to Glenelg (Which is totally a palindrome. Just look at it.), and an unused ticket to Henley Beach.

I’m just saying. Maybe he built a time machine or something.

So, they did what you always do when you find an unknown dead dude on the beach: Threw him in a dumpster and called it a day. Wait, I mean, they did an autopsy. (What I said before, don’t worry about that.) And when you do an autopsy you can usually find some trauma or wounds or poison in the stomach or something. In the case of The Somerton Man, as he came to be known, they found… absolutely jack shit. Apparently, the dude just quit living. That’s totally a medical conclusion that can be reached.

“It was the opposite of being ‘too legit.’”

Since they didn’t find any real cause of death, (although some heretofore unknown poison was decided to be most likely) they sewed his ass back up, pumped him full of chemicals and let him sit around for nine months while they investigated. They briefly believed that a man named E.C. Johnson might have been their victim, but he kinda ruined that when he showed up to the police station alive. Things were at a dead (hah) end at that point until two weeks later, when train station workers found a briefcase with its label removed that had been checked into their cloak room the day before the Somerton Man had showed up on the beach.

Inside, police found more clothes with the tags cut out, an electrician’s screwdriver, stenciling scissors and brush, a table knife fashioned into a sharp instrument (probably also used for stenciling), and a bit of thread, which had also been used to repair a pocket in the dead man’s trousers. Also found were a tie, laundry bag, and singlet, each with a dry cleaning tag bearing the name Tom Keane on them. Unfortunately, the only missing Tom Keane anywhere in the world wasn’t their guy, and so police assumed that the killer left that name behind because that wasn’t the victim.

“Samsonite! I was way off.”

However, the man’s coat was American-made, and not imported. Presumably, that meant the coat had been fitted to him, as was the practice with this style of coat, but police couldn’t rule out that it had been originally tailored for someone with the same measurements as the victim and that he had bought it second-hand. And so it was back to the drawing board, until someone took a look at that repaired pocket and found that it wasn’t a repair at all.

A secret pocket had been sewn into the victim’s trouser pocket, and inside was a slip of paper that read “Taman Shud”. (This became the popular name by which to refer to the case in later years.) They soon found out that the phrase was Persian, and that it was the last line of a book of poetry called “The Rubaiyat”, by a man named Omar Khayyam. Roughly translated, it means “The end” or “Finished.” Since the scrap of paper did appear to be from a printed book, police set out to find the copy it had been clipped from.

Soon after, an anonymous man contacted police and told them that he had a copy of the book mysteriously appear in his unlocked car the night before the Somerton Man was found. After examining the book, authorities determined that this copy of the book was indeed the one they had been looking for. In addition, the back cover page had faint pencil markings in it, which appeared to be some sort of code.

“Dear diary, my alphabet soup and I had a fight again today.”

The code was examined by cryptographers all over the world. While most agreed that it was some sort of code, they didn’t have enough information to crack it. (It remains unsolved today.) In addition to the code, police found an unlisted phone number belonging to a former nurse (whose name was unreleased) who lived less than a mile from the beach where the body had been found. When she was questioned about the case, she confirmed that she had once owned a copy of “The Rubaiyat”, but had given it to a soldier named Alfred Boxall back during World War II. Investigators then came to believe that Boxall was the Somerton Man.

Except he wasn’t, because Alfred Boxall was still alive and working at a bus station near Sydney. In fact, when police came to Boxall, not only was he still alive, but he had his copy of “The Rubaiyat” and showed it to them. It had a dedication from the unnamed nurse on the front inside cover and the Taman Shud verse in the back was intact. He and the nurse both claimed to know nothing of the dead man. Rumors stated that Boxall may have been a former intelligence officer (which he did not deny in at least one interview) and that the Somerton Man had been some sort of Russian spy, but neither was ever confirmed.

And that’s where the trail ends. 60 years later, there’s still no positive identification of the victim, no cause of death, no firm evidence that it wasn’t just a suicide, an uncracked code, an unidentified woman, and an unmarked grave where the body was finally buried. Television programs and criminal justice students have attempted, time and again, to uncover new evidence, but none have. Australia even opened its own intelligence agency as a result of the Taman Shud case. The case is still considered open to this day.

“I guess I’ll just wait here until you guys are finished.”

Sources:
Wikipedia (Because knowing is half the battle)