Category: Top Story

He tried to stop after the first murder, but the compulsion to kill was just too great to resist

To say that Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born dirt poor would be an understatement. Many a day his main meal consisted of dirty grass and dry leaves picked from the trees on the land that his family worked for free.

This was, of course, before he became known as The Butcher of Rostov.

Born in Ukraine under the icy grip of Joseph Stalin in 1936, the regime’s collectivization of agriculture imposed a harsh famine on the whole of the country, robbing food from the bellies of the population, and pride from their weary souls.

He grew up on a barely fertile patch of dirt that his parents toiled on tirelessly, in a hut that was nothing more than a few planks of wood held upright by a leaky roof. The meager produce scraped from the dirt was mostly confiscated by the government, leaving them with next to nothing to eat until the next harvest. 

Even so, though hard to believe, they were better off than most.

Whether true or not, his mother often repeated to him how his elder brother had been kidnapped at the age of four by one of the neighbors. They had taken him, she had explained, because hunger had driven them to do the unthinkable. His brother, she had further explained, had never been seen or heard from again, and, for a while, the neighbors complained not at all about any feelings of hunger pangs.

Life for Andrei worsened even further at the advent of the Second World War with the brutal Nazi occupation of Ukraine in 1941, and his father being conscripted into the army. He witnessed murders, bombings, and even the rape of his own mother.

His father, who had been captured during the war, returned to find a new daughter added to his family, a post-war famine that haunted most of the Soviet Union, and a son who was constantly bullied at school, often fainting in classes from sheer lack of food. Life was hard.

Yet Andrei was eager to learn, reading and absorbing information like a sponge, possibly filling his mind with knowledge because most days he was unable to put even one grain of rice into his empty belly. Despite this, he was a model student.

This was all, of course, before he became known as The Butcher of Rostov.

In 1954 he graduated from school with excellent grades, yet failed in his application to Moscow State University the following year. For the next few months, he worked as a laborer in Kursk and then studied to be a communications technician in a vocational school for the next two. During this period, he met his first serious girlfriend.

They tried to maintain the relationship for eighteen months, but in the end, it failed, the fact that Andrei couldn’t maintain an erection a less than hard nail in the coffin.

Between 1957 and 1960, he served his compulsory military service in the Soviet army, then returned to the village of his birth, reuniting with his family. But this relocation was as short-lived as the new girl he met there.

After three months of non-intimacy, they parted, rumors about his impotency whispered behind tattered curtains and over strong drinks. Andrei fled in shame to a nearby village not far from Rostov-on-Don.

Here, life improved with a new job, a new apartment, and after his sister moved out after living with him for six months, a new girlfriend.

This new girlfriend, introduced by his sister, became his wife and, even with his erectile dysfunction, they managed to have two children, a daughter in 1965, and a son in 1969.

With a family to care for, Andrei attained a teaching degree in 1970 and went to work at a facility in Novoshakhtinsk as a Russian language and literature teacher. It was here that he sexually assaulted his first victim.

A blind eye was turned away from his indiscretions, at first, but when too many voices were raised he was forced to move on. He found another similar job at a nearby college, the rumors left behind, his dirty habits carried along and quickly exposed, literally, for his students to see.

In March 1981 he had to abandon his urge to teach, complaints against him too loud to ignore, his urge to molest his students too strong to control.

His new employment as a supply clerk at a construction company allowed him the freedom to travel the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, and continue a hobby that he had started surreptitiously back in 1978 — murder.

Yelena Zakotnova was his first victim, her last day of life squeezed from her just before Christmas on December 22, 1978.

Chikatilo had lured her to an old house, and in his failed attempts to rape her, he had resorted to strangling her to death and stabbing her repeatedly, frustrated, incensed, sexually aroused as she gasped her last breath. He had then disposed of her body in the Grushevka River.

She had been 9 years old.

At first, Chikatilo tried to resist the urges that had escalated from molestation to murder, but he had discovered a side of himself that was too strong to ignore for long, and it was only a matter of time before he surrendered completely to his dark side.

Between 1981 and 1990 he killed, molested, and mutilated the corpses of at least fifty-six people.

He now became known as The Butcher of Rostov.

An incredibly accurate 65-page psychological profile was drawn up in 1985 as the hunt to find him intensified, the bodies, both male and female, continuing to mount up, eyes mutilated, multiple knife wounds the killing blows.

The profile reported a middle-aged man who had had problems in childhood, was married with children, and, most damning of all, someone who could only achieve sexual fulfillment by having the power over his victims as he stabbed the life out of them.

Unnerved, Chikatilo restricted himself to selecting victims outside of the Rostov region and only when he was traveling for work. He thought he was being careful, but the manhunt was closing in on him, the net getting tighter.

But not enough to trap him, and the killings continued from the Rostov Oblast to Shakty and beyond, despite the fact that on more than one occasion suspicions abounded around his presence in the same areas where the murders were committed.

For more than 10 years, Chikatilo had been murdering women, teenagers, boys, girls, and children indiscriminately, and getting away with it. In 1990, after killing 11-year-old Andrei Kravchenko in January, 10-year-old Yaroslav Makarov in March, 31-year-old Lyubov Zuyeva in April, 13-year-old Victor Petrov in July, and 11-year-old Ivan Fomin in August, his luck was about to run out.

With public and political pressure mounting, an operation was set in place on October 27 to catch the prolific serial killer. The plan involved having a strong police presence around several large train stations in the Rostov Oblast while, in an effort to force the serial killer into a trap, placing undercover officers in the smaller ones.

Three days after the start of the operation, the body of 16-year-old Vadim Gromov was discovered. Three days after that the body of 16-year-old Victor Tishchenko was found with the multiple stab wounds that were Chikatilo’s calling card. Three days after that, Svetlana Korostik, 22 years old, was killed and mutilated. She was to be his last and final victim.

An undercover officer at one of the small train stations, reported Chikatilo’s suspicious behavior and he was placed under intense surveillance and the whole task force focused their attention on him. For the next six days they monitored his every movement and interviewed anyone who had not only worked with him while he was a teacher, but his students, and anyone who had ever come in contact with him.

After delving meticulously through the unsavory evidence, they promptly arrested him on November 20.

But it wasn’t over. Not yet. All the police had was circumstantial evidence, nothing concrete that could tie him to any of the bodies he had left in his wake. And they only had ten days to prove their case or they had to let him go free.

The head of the task force interrogated him nonstop, with no success, Chikatilo maintaining his innocence.

It was only, amazingly, when the psychologist, Dr. Bukhanovsky, shined a light on how he fit the profile of the monster depicted in the 65-page psychological report, that Chikatilo broke down and confessed to all the murders.

The trial started on April 14 1992 and there was never any doubt a few months later on October 15 what the verdict would be.

On 14 February 1994, Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo, also known as The Butcher of Rostov, was taken from his cell to a soundproofed room in Novocherskassk prison and sent to an unmarked grave with a bullet to the back of his head.

With a choice of being a victim or the victimizer, a young boy chooses to become a monster

If there was one serial killer who deserved to be sentenced to death it was Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour.

Like all babies, he was born innocent, but that innocence was squeezed out of him at an early age and replaced by a malicious evil that enabled him, on the mean streets of Cairo in the 1990s, to become the brutal leader of a street gang while still in his teens.

Born in the small village of Tanta just north of Cairo, Egypt, from the age of 12 he worked in a small cafeteria at the local train station to help support his family, returning at the end of the day to give his paltry earnings to his parents.

Some days his earnings were even less than paltry, or totally non-existent, replaced by bruises and scars delivered by a local thug called “Al-Tourbini”, The Express Train.

The young Mansour endured the regular beatings and the loss of his hard-earned wages at the fists of his tormentor for as long as he could, powerless as he was, too small to fight back, too poor to leave the job.

Then one day that decision of whether to stay or leave was made for him as his tormentor threw him from a moving train, not caring if Ramadan lived or died. But before doing that he stole all his money, gave him another beating, and brutally raped him.

It took Mansour a month in hospital to recover from his physical injuries; his mental ones were to be an open sore for the rest of his life, a life that was to be forever damaged due to this one horrific event.

When he was finally released, he decided to run away from his past rather than return home and escaped to Cairo, his soul as empty of feelings as his pockets were of money.

Alone for the first time in his life, penniless, hungry, he was easily lured into a local street gang who welcomed him into their cold embrace.

Their indoctrination process involved more beatings, and harsh lessons of survival, any mistakes rewarded by a quick slice or two from a sharp razor blade.

Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour was a quick study, absorbed the pain inflicted upon him, proudly displayed the scars, learned the lessons, and fostered feelings of revenge upon those who tortured him ritually, gleefully.

As he rose up the ranks in the gang, he suppressed his urges and used his anger to propel him to eventually become the leader.

Unfortunately, rather than becoming a beacon for reform, for changing past injustices within the gang, Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour became the worst kind of monster on the mean streets of Cairo.

Those within the street gang who had tortured him relentlessly were killed, their bodies discarded like so much trash in the fetid alleyways.

Mansour reveled in the newfound power that he had never possessed before in his life, no longer a victim, the cloak of the bully sitting perfectly on his broadening shoulders.

But he didn’t just become a brutal, heartless killer. He became a brutal, heartless rapist.

His victims were those in his own gang who got on his wrong side, any runaways he encountered, any boys who would not be missed by anyone any time soon, or ever.

One such intended victim was Ahmed Nagui, a 12-year-old member of Mansour’s gang. Somehow, he managed to escape Mansour’s clutches and reported the attempted rape to the local police.

His report was followed up, and Mansour was interviewed, but it became a case of who was the most credible person. When a scrawny street thug accuses an adult of assault, of rape, official ears and eyes can be deaf and blind when no evidence or witnesses accompany the accusations.

Ahmed Nagui’s case was dismissed out of hand, but the corroborating evidence was soon to follow in the most horrific fashion.

Incensed at being questioned, and interrogated by the local police for hours, Mansour retaliated in the worst way he knew how, raping Ahmed, then murdering him, then hurling his lifeless body from a moving train.

This became his M.O., and he soon became known as Al Tourbini, the same name as the rapist who had molested him when he was himself 12-years-old. Rather than shy away from his new name, however, he embraced it, and for the next seven years, from Cairo to Alexandria to Ben Sueif, he murdered, raped, and brutalized 32 boys from the ages of 10 to 14.

All empathy, all traces of a conscience had been squeezed from the soul of Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour.

He and his six accomplices would lure unsuspecting children up to the carriage on top of the train, rape, beat and brutalize them, then hurl them from the speeding train, whether they were dead or barely alive.

They just didn’t care.

If not for the police discovering three discarded bodies by the side of the train tracks in 2006, the spree would have continued for years.

As it was, two of Mansour’s accomplices were arrested when the trail of dead bodies led back to them. They were interrogated in a non-friendly manner in a dank cellar, the fear in their eyes locked on the ground in an attempt to avoid the near murderous looks they were getting from their interrogators.

At first, they denied everything, even knowing Mansour, but they could sense, by the way the knuckles of the officers were whitening on their batons, that they had to confess or those batons were soon going to be used to beat the truth out of them.

Mansour was promptly arrested along with another four accomplices. All seven of them went to court, their guilt evident, each with their own version to tell to get the lightest sentence possible. Apart from Mansour.

He displayed no remorse whatsoever, his callous recounting of how he had committed his despicable crimes told in a matter-of-fact manner.

During the trial, Mansour fully confessed to raping and killing 32 young boys, yet only 15 bodies were ever recovered. His murderous crime spree had spread far across the country and many of his victims had been casually tossed into the Nile, buried alive, or pulverized when thrown before oncoming trains.

Shocked to his core, the judge handed down sentences commensurate to the heinous crimes. Five of the accomplices were given prison terms in 2007 when the trial concluded of between 3 and 40 years. The harshest verdicts were handed down to Mansour and Farag Samir Mahmoud, his henchman.

They were both given the death penalty, and three years later on December 16, 2010, in Burj Al Arab Prison, their executions were carried out, a noose slipped over their heads, cinched in place, and then their connection to the earth kicked away until they gasped their last breaths.

Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour’s reign of terror was over, and a remorseless serial killer, callously known as Al-Tourbini, was removed from the streets of Cairo.

And a system that had failed Ahmed Nagui and 31 other young victims, had finally meted out justice to a rapist and a killer who, in the end, got exactly what he deserved.

A mission over a small island in the Pacific during WWII that could have had historic consequences

There were many heroes during WWII, heroes forged out of necessity, instinct, a need for self-preservation and to protect their fellow servicemen.   

And just as conversely there were those who survived by sheer luck where others perished, a bullet dodged, a seat selected in a section of a tank that escapes the blast of a bombing where the others did not, or a plane crash miraculously walked away from.    

In September 1944, heroism came in the form of one soldier who risked his life to save those of his comrades as their fatally strafed plane plunged towards the earth.   

On this fateful day, the crew of 3, the pilot, turret gunner, and radioman, were on a bombing mission over Japanese occupied Chichijima, a small island in the Pacific Ocean. Their task was to destroy the Japanese radio communications towers along with the other planes in the squadron, and the Grumman TBF Avenger aircraft they were in was ideally suited for the mission due to its load capacity to carry torpedo bombs.    

All the crew were young men, experienced soldiers as only a brutal war can instill experience in the young in such a short space of time.   

They had been flying before the break of dawn and were closing in on their objectives.  

Ignoring the cacophonous sounds of explosions as the enemy attempted to blow them out of the sky, they counted down the minutes to when they would be dropping their payload, eyes glued to their instruments, hands steady on the controls even as the plane was rocked from side to side.  

The time seemed to stretch on forever, the Japanese artillery getting closer, the explosions louder, the targets appearing further away.   

And then they were hit. But they weren’t the only ones.    

Smoke and flames billowed from a plane close to them, and down it went, spiraling crazily into enemy territory, their fates sealed if they survived the crash landing.   

The young pilot instinctively realized that their plane, too, could soon be following that doomed aircraft. His first thought was for the survival of his crew, his second was to complete the mission, despite the risk to himself.   

With black, acrid smoke billowing into the cockpit, the 20-year-old pilot and his crew launched the 500-pound torpedoes as soon as they were close enough, obliterating their target and severing the vital lines of communications of the Japanese. Mission completed, they turned back out to sea, limping like an injured bird trying to stay aloft, aware that it was safer to crash into the open sea and await rescue rather than fall into the waiting gun-toting arms of the enemy.  

But they had left it too late. The stricken plane was going down. Fast.   

Hastily donning their parachutes, the three airmen attempted to escape the crumbling, burning wreckage. One airman was destined to die before he could leap clear as the aircraft slammed into the ocean, disintegrating on impact.   

Of the two who bailed out just in time, only one parachute fluttered open.   

On exiting the disintegrating aircraft, the young pilot cracked his skull on the tail of the plane, ripping his parachute, but somehow staying aloft as his compatriot plummeted past him to his death.    

Dazed, bleeding, he struggled to retain control as the roiling waves beneath rushed to embrace him. The splashdown was brutal, but he was alive. But for how long?   

His splashdown didn’t go unnoticed by the Japanese and their gunboats zoomed in to capture him.   

Seeing one of their comrades in danger, the other US airplanes provided cover for the next few hours, strafing any Japanese vessel that came too close. They were determined to rescue him, the Japanese were determined to capture him.   

It was a standoff, with nowhere for airplanes to land and the enemy gunboats held at bay by a continuous barrage of bullets.     

All the young pilot could do, floating vulnerably for hours, vomiting, dizzy from the blow to his head, was wait, either to be rescued or captured and tortured by the enemy.   

The wait came to an end when a large shape emerged from the depths beneath him, the submarine USS Finback coming to his rescue, finally ending his torturous ordeal.   

He was going home, but that day several planes had been shot down and the crew, captured by the Japanese, would not be.  

Their fate was to be gruesome in the extreme but the details were not to be released until decades later, so appalling would they have been to the families and loved ones left behind.    

Of the 9 airmen shot down that day, the 8 who were captured, were tortured, beheaded, bayonetted, and some were even cannibalized. None survived.  

The true horrors and details were so shocking that the Japanese generals who undertook these heinous atrocities, not out of hunger but out of scorn for the enemy, were hunted down and brought to justice years later.    

The 9th airmen, the only survivor of the fateful mission, was a hero that day, risking his own life to complete his mission, surviving more by luck than design.  

That surviving airman was George HW. Bush, the future President of the United States of America.     

If, like his compatriot onboard the stricken Avenger aircraft, his parachute had failed to open, who knows how the future may have unfolded, how the destiny of a country could have been reshaped…

Sometimes the smallest change can result in a catastrophic outcome!

There’s no doubt that when an accident occurs in a nuclear waste management facility, an intense investigation will follow that will result in fingers being pointed, careers ruined, and heads rolling.  

On February 14, 2014, at the Waste Isolation Plant located in New Mexico, a drum that contained nuclear waste accidentally burst open on the warehouse floor. Fortunately, this section of the facility was half a mile underground so there was no risk of radioactive exposure above ground.   

The workers were another story. Approximately 22 workers were exposed to the radiation emanating from the barrel but were fortunately given the all-clear.  

It was up to the contractor that operated the facility, Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC, to adhere to all the protocols as the fallout, both media and financial, could be hazardous to the health of their company.  

As per that protocol, all essential personnel were evacuated from that area while, suited up in protective equipment, an inspection crew evaluated the spillage. Their findings were inconclusive so to delve even deeper into the cause of the incident an independent expert was needed, and the name at the top of the list was David T. Hobbs.   

His resume included an in-depth knowledge of nuclear waste materials garnered over a thirty-year period, yet even he was to uncover something he had never encountered before.  

His first point of inquiry was to ascertain why a sealed drum had ruptured seemingly with no outside interference or any form of detonation and to indefinitely suspend all key operations at the site until his investigation was completed.  

After one year of intense scrutiny, and eliminating the usual incidents that could have caused a drum to rupture, he came to the conclusion that there had been a thermogenic chemical reaction within the drum caused by incompatible substances.  

When transporting dangerous radioactive substances in barrels, a combination of compounds is added to absorb the dangerous liquids and make them more stable for both transportation and storage. The mixture in some of the drums reacted adversely to have the exact opposite effect, creating a chemical reaction that generated enough internal force to dislodge the lid on one of the drums.  

But even upon closer inspection of the ingredients, Hobbs couldn’t at first ascertain what the difference was between this mixture compared to previous additives used in thousands of drums that had passed through the complex.  

And then he saw it. And it was a new one on him, and definitely a facepalm moment.  

The Los Alamos National Laboratory was accustomed to packaging radioisotopes for disposal and sending them to the Waste Isolation Plant in New Mexico. One of the components, used because of its absorption capabilities, is kitty litter.  

What someone had done somewhere along the chain, unfortunately, was to change the standard inorganic kitty litter to a 100% organic one. That simple change rendered the kitty litter incompatible with the other neutralizing agents within the barrel.   

The resulting chemical reaction generated enough heat and internal pressure to dislodge the lid and cause the hazardous waste of radioactive materials within to spill out.  

That simple oversight led to the site in New Mexico being fined $54 million, losing $240 million in recovery costs, closing down for years, and jeopardizing the health of the workers.  

It just goes to show that sometimes, organic isn’t always better. 

Sometimes true evil comes disguised as a nurse with a comforting bedside manner

On December 30, 1976, Niels Högel entered the world in a quiet town on the coast of Wilhelmshaven, West Germany. He had an older sister, and his grandmother and father were nurses, his mother a paralegal. They were a normal family, respected by the community.

No one could predict what a devastating impact Niels Högel would have on the lives of so many and that his name would go down in history.

At the age of 20 in 1997, he completed his vocational training and followed in his father’s footsteps, and became a nurse at the same hospital, the Sankt-Willehad Hospital in Wilhelmshaven.

Two years later he went to work at the Oldenburg clinic, and it wasn’t long before a spike in patient fatalities and the inexplicable resuscitations were taking place at record levels. What was going on?

In August 2001 a meeting was called for all the doctors and medical staff to attend. The evidence presented by the investigators pointed squarely in Högel’s direction. He was asked directly why 58% of the fatalities had occurred while he was on duty.

Caught in the headlights of accusations, Högel denied any wrongdoing whatsoever. On the outside, he appeared composed under their intense questioning, but on the inside, his heart was racing out of control, fear almost paralyzing him that he had been found out.

The statistics were clear to see, though, the link obvious, the shifts he worked reflecting the spike in deaths.

But there was no proof, not a shred of evidence. And even when Högel, slightly panicking, took 3 weeks off sick directly after the meeting, and the fatality rate plummeted, there was nothing that could be done against him. The only consequence he suffered was a transfer from the cardiac intensive care unit where he was positioned to the anesthesiology department.

Unanswered questions and watchful eyes followed him for the next year. In September 2002, he was confronted once again when patients who should be problem-free after surgery, displayed unexplainable life-threatening complications afterward.

Unsure whether Högel just wasn’t any good at his job, or was purposefully putting patients’ lives at risk, the head physician sternly suggested that Högel resign or get transferred to a department where all he would be doing would be transporting patients from one part of the hospital to another.

The Oldenburg Clinic couldn’t risk the lives of patients by having Högel in a position where he was administering drugs unsupervised. The head physician would have preferred to sack him but all he had was the fatality statistics and his intuition that Högel wasn’t quite right. Unfortunately, there had been no actual complaints, nothing concrete on any wrongdoing on his part.

The director of nursing the following month amazingly supported Högel when he complained about his treatment, writing a glowing reference letter stating that he was an exemplary employee, was devoted to his job and that under critical situations completed his tasks satisfactorily.

Högel felt exonerated and used that reference letter in December to get a post at the Delmenhurst Clinic, leaving the suspicions behind, and starting with a clean slate, past mistakes left behind. In a perfect world, at the very least, a hint of what had occurred during his time at Oldenburg should have been whispered in the ears of his new employers.

This information would have been crucial to his appointment to a department with patients suffering from critical arrhythmia attacks and sudden, dangerous drops in blood pressure.

But perhaps the Oldenburg Clinic was just happy to get rid of him…

Between 2003 and 2005, Högel had a daughter and got married, but that was the only change in his life – everything else remained constant. During that two-year time period, an investigation was opened, unsurprisingly, into the sudden spate of fatalities whenever Högel was on duty. History was repeating itself, people were dying, yet the clinic did nothing.

His superiors dismissed clear evidence of wrongdoing even when four vials of ajmaline were discovered on Högel’s ward.

Ajmaline is an antiarrhythmic drug used to suppress abnormal heartbeats in patients and can only be prescribed by a doctor, but if the wrong dose is administered the resulting reaction can be a fatal cardiac arrest.

No prescription was found and all four vials were empty.

It wasn’t until 22 June 2005, when Högel was caught in the act of injecting a patient with ajmaline when he had no right to be doing so, that things came to a head.

This time the investigation was conducted by the police, a more in-depth investigation, interviewing his workmates and poring over the list of fatalities during his time at the clinic. The year-long investigation revealed the huge spike in deaths and, in December 2006, Högel was sentenced to 7-and-a-half years in prison for attempted murder. His past misdeeds had finally caught up with him.

But there were more revelations to come as the police dug deeper.

Approximately 60 patients had been resuscitated at one time or another under Högel’s watch, while 30 had died from his unauthorized injections of ajmaline and other cardiac medications. Confronted with the damning evidence, he confessed to the murders and, in 2015, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of those 30 patients.

The case became the biggest peacetime murder trial in German history and prompted further, closer inspections of the deaths that were classed as natural causes while Högel had worked at the Sankt-Willehad Hospital and the clinics Oldenburg and Delmenhurst.

Bodies were exhumed in the ensuing years, autopsies were conducted in cases where the corpses hadn’t been cremated, and traces of ajmaline were found in dozens of them. The revelations were explosive, the confession of Högel to the murder of over 100 patients damning when it came to light, staggering in the casual way he admitted his guilt.

Niels Högel was to go down as the most prolific serial killer in peacetime Germany, the final tally of his 15-year murder spree nearing 300 trusting victims.

Asked why he had killed so many people, how he could murder vulnerable patients so callously, his response was unemotional, chilling, lacking any shred of normal human morals.

He confessed that he had administered the potentially fatal drugs partially in an effort to impress his colleagues with his resuscitation skills, and partially out of boredom.

Högel may have grown up in a traditional family with loving parents, may have followed in his fathers’ footsteps in a profession to care for his community, but from the very beginning, his inner monster was just lurking behind his disarming smile and his seemingly comforting bedside manner.

Niels Högel was a nurse by profession, by vocation he was the worst kind of serial killer.

A normal day takes a turn for the worse with dire consequences.

The iconic Kruger National Park in South Africa is a mecca for tourists from across the globe.  

Every year its incredible scenery is unveiled, discovered, and rediscovered on safaris with wide-eyed travelers as they trek across the 2.2 million hectares on an adventure of a lifetime. 

It is classed as the third largest park in the world and is home to over 500 different species of birds, 12,00 elephants, nearly 3,000 lions, almost 30,000 African Buffalos, as well as leopards, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, and snakes.  

It is nature at its wildest, displayed in a setting that at first appears picture-perfect, but at the same time is untamed, unpredictable, majestic. Danie Pienaar loved working here. 

In 1998 as a student, his duties involved tracking white rhinos near the Phabeni tributary. Day after day he would record their movements, never tiring of watching them on their migratory tours. 

On this particular day in January, the water of the tributary was running deep but Danie had to wade across somehow if he was to continue monitoring the rhinos. He wasn’t concerned about getting wet as the shorts he wore would dry quickly under the heat emanating from the ground itself. 

Something caught his eye before he entered the water, though, slithering sneakily on the periphery of his vision. His mind identified it as a snake, a large one, but it wasn’t close so in he went, the water quickly getting waist-deep, his eyes tracking the movements of the herd. 

He was only a few paces in when the snake struck. 

Even before he looked at his knee, Danie knew he had been bitten. Seeing the four blue-purple bite marks, his worst fears were realized that the snake had struck him twice in two lightning-fast strikes. 

The snake had been a Black Mamba. It was one of the most feared snakes in Africa and just two drops of its toxic venom were strong enough to kill an adult. Each of its fangs could hold 20 drops, and Danie had been bitten twice. 

He knew the reality of his situation, knew that the venom coursing through his veins contained both neurotoxins and cardiotoxins, one attacking his nervous system and the other speeding towards his heart with every beat. 

When the bad taste started in his mouth, followed quickly by an uncomfortable tingling sensation in his fingertips and lips, a feeling of dread ran through him, a feeling that he was going to die. 

Venom from a Black Mamba was fatal unless treated quickly. The young student was alone, only a basic inadequate kit on hand, and a long, long way away from the emergency assistance he so desperately needed.  

He couldn’t panic, or he was dead. 

He had to control his breathing, slow his heart rate, or he was dead. 

The hairs on his body shimmered, bringing a chill on the blisteringly hot day. But that wouldn’t last. The ensuing symptoms would be blurred vision, drowsiness, mental confusion followed by paralysis. 

His choices were to accept the inevitable, slump under the shade of a tree, or try at the very least to live.  

It was impossible for him to know exactly how much venom had been injected by the fangs and with the bite being below the knee, he reasoned that he may just have a chance of survival. He would find out within the hour if he lost all self-awareness or was still able to make rational decisions. That one hour may well be how much time he had left before it was all over.  

Somehow, he had to move quickly without elevating the beating of his heart, or the toxins lurking in his bloodstream would shorten the time he had left significantly. It was going to be a challenge, to say the least, and the odds were not in his favor. 

Tying a tourniquet just above the bites, he left a note explaining what had happened, just in case he collapsed on his way back. Pocketing his gun, knife, and compass, he headed back resolutely towards where he had parked his pickup truck. 

At first, the urge to go as fast as he could walk was overwhelming, the toxic timebomb ticking inside him. Controlling his breathing as much as he could, placing one unsteady step in front of the other, he eventually made it made to the truck, sweating profusely.  

He had lost track of time by now and tunnel vision had encroached on his ability to self-analyze, to think critically, to think clearly. 

Time was running out. 

Flooring the truck, he headed towards the tourist road at a breakneck speed.

Screeching to a halt a few kilometers later, he leaped out of the truck and flagged down the first car he came across. 

Barely able to understand his slurred words, the driver and passengers transported him to Pretoriuskop Rest Camp. Unfortunately, the facilities there were inadequate to treat him and he had to be transported by road, as a helicopter was unavailable, to Nelspruit, which was about an hour or so away. 

Once arriving at the hospital, barely coherent, he mumbled through his numbing lips and swollen tongue what had happened to him. The doctors were skeptical, doubting that he would still be alive after so much elapsed time if that were the case. 

When they finally released the tourniquet that Danie had set in place, things deteriorated in an instant, the last of the venom flooding his system and causing him to black out. 

When he came to, unsure how long he had been out, he was on a ventilator, unable to move a muscle yet fully aware of his surroundings. His worst fears screamed in his head that after everything he had gone through to reach the hospital that he was now paralyzed, locked in his body with no way to communicate. 

He recalled a similar case where the doctors had thought the patient was in a coma, and panic seized him in its terrifying grip, aware that he could be locked in this state for years, possibly confined to a long, terrifying end attached to a machine. 

The venom had rendered him completely immobile and the only time he was able to see was when a nurse or doctor lifted his eyelids to check on his vital responses. Then he would be sent back into the inky void behind his own eyelids, fully aware of his surroundings yet so paralyzed that he was unable even to blink. 

This was the worst-case scenario he could ever have imagined – alive yet trapped in his own body. The fact that he was still alive was no consolation under the circumstances. 

At this time no anti-venom had been administered, but luck was on his side. Slowly, his own body flushed some of the toxins from his system, allowing him not to move exactly, but at least to twitch a foot almost imperceptibly that got the attention of one of his visitors, Dewald Keet. 

Keet alerted the doctors who ascertained that Danie was not actually comatose, and over the next few days, he regained full mobility and was finally released.  

For a while, he suffered from cold sweats and it took weeks for the bite marks to vanish, but eventually, he recovered completely and was soon back at work, tracking the rhinos and doing the job he loved. 

From that point on he was extremely aware of the dangers lurking on the periphery of his vision. But moreover, he was aware that he had been incredibly lucky to have survived two bites from a Black Mamba isolated as he had been at the time. 

He had survived because of his young age, because he had had the wherewithal to apply a tourniquet above the bite marks, because he had been extremely lucky, and just perhaps because it hadn’t been his time to die. 

Are there spirits and demons lurking in the shadows to take control of the vulnerable?

It’s hard to believe that on March 14, 2019, a family was on trial at London’s Old Bailey for performing an exorcism. 

The incident started innocuously enough about three years previously when 26-year-old Kennedy Ife contracted a sore throat. His condition deteriorated drastically on August 19 when he appeared to have delusions, complaining feverishly that something was inside him, something that wanted to get out. 

His parents, Kenneth Sr and Josephine Ife, were deeply religious people who had settled in London from Nigeria. They also had somewhat deeply bizarre religious beliefs which their sons, Harry, Roy, Colin, Daniel and Samuel who were twins, also believed in. 

When Kenneth Jr tried to bite his father and threatened to cut off his own penis, they all came to the conclusion that he was possessed by a demon, and that he had to be restrained for his own protection. And theirs. 

Modern medicine would be completely ineffective against what was torturing their son, they reasoned. The only way to save him, to free him, to cure him, was to perform an exorcism. 

Kenneth Sr was a highly educated professor, had advised the British government on African economic affairs, had met the Queen herself, and was a consultant to the Economic Community of West African States. He wasn’t someone who would immediately be associated with the strange beliefs that he carried with him from his homeland of Nigeria. 

One of the religions in Nigeria stems from the Yoruba Traditionalists whose core beliefs revolve around the fact that demons are real, that there are spiritual demons with the capability to possess the vulnerable, the cursed. Once penetrated by one of these demons a person can appear insane, display irrational behaviors that can cause harm to themselves as well as others. 

Logically, where there are possessions by spiritual demons, there are exorcists.  

These trained Yoruba exorcists are called Babalawo or Onisegun and receive a certification after the course so they are recognized as reputable exorcists. The duration of the course varies, depending on the aptitude of the student, and once accredited they are qualified to excise demons from the possessed. 

In the case of Kenneth Ife, his family, with their deeply held beliefs from their native country, wholeheartedly believed he was possessed and that there was only one way to save his life, and his soul. 

Fearing that Kenneth, ranting about the mark of the beast, delirious, his father and brothers used cable ties and a rope to restrain him. In the process, snapping out, Kenneth bit his father. Convinced in their course of action, he ordered his sons to take shifts praying over their brother in an attempt to drive the evil spirits out. 

For the next three days, the Ife family brought to bear the full might of their religion in an effort to save Kenneth from the demon that they believed was killing him. 

All their efforts were in vain. On August 22, 67 hours after the exorcism had started, Kenneth Ife died. 

Believing that this was the work of the evil spirits, his father and brothers continued to try and resurrect him, praying harder. In the end, they had to concede that the demon had won, had taken his soul, and called the emergency services. 

The police, when they arrived, were appalled at what they found. Kenneth Ife had over 60 injuries on his body from being forcibly restrained, and even to their untrained eyes appeared severely dehydrated.  

A preceding autopsy revealed that the cause of death was a heart attack, the strain on his body over 67 hours of mistreatment too much for his heart. 

The police were unconvinced when they heard the explanation. For them, the young man at the scene had obviously been restrained against his will, mistreated, and murdered. Charges of manslaughter were unsurprisingly brought against the whole family. 

The Ife’s explained the situation as one when the case came before the Old Bailey in 2019. They reiterated that Kenneth was exhibiting typical symptoms of someone who was inhabited by evil spirits, and that modern medicine would be ineffective as a treatment. 

Prayer, they explained passionately to the judge and jury, was the only way to cure him of his affliction. They had only restrained him briefly when Kenneth had attacked Josephine and threatened to harm himself. 

On March 14, 2019, after a month of giving evidence, of relatives attesting to Kenneth’s violent behavior days before his death, the jury cleared the Ife’s of manslaughter, false imprisonment, and causing the death of Kenneth Ife. 

The Ife’s never denied that they had resorted to exorcism to save Kenneth. What they did in court was emphasize their deeply held religious beliefs and how, for example, in the Nigerian Pentecostal Christian Church, exorcisms were commonplace. 

But what was incontrovertible was that within the 67-hour period that Kenneth was incarcerated, he was delirious, violent, forcibly restrained, and ultimately died from a heart attack. That was the recorded cause of death from the pathologist on the death certificate, not a case of demonic possession. 

Kenneth Ife Sr, his wife, Josephine, and their five sons had no doubt that they had done the right thing in attempting to cast forth the evil spirits. It was just that the demon had taken too firm a hold on Kenneth and that, in the end, had proven to be too powerful for them to cast it out. 

What does it take to turn a serial stalker into a serial killer?

Daniel LaPlante’s childhood turned him into a serial killer. 

He was born in Townsend, Massachusetts in 1970, on May 16, and had two brothers, Steven and Mathew. From an early age, he was physically, psychologically, and sexually abused by his father.  If that wasn’t bad enough, he was then abused by his stepfather in the same manner.  

In his early teens, he was recommended by his school to see a psychiatrist. This only exacerbated his trauma as he was then sexually abused by the psychiatrist for over a year. Unsurprisingly, during this period he struggled at school on many levels, his diagnosed dyslexia compounding his feeling of isolation even further.  

Other students found him unsettling, off in some way, and avoided him like the plague. He had no friends, no one to confide in, no help. 

In his mid-teens he went off the rails, stepping outside the law by committing a slew of break-ins. At first, this new career choice was just to steal valuables to make money, but the more he got away with it the more invincible he felt, the more powerful. He began to break into homes just to move things around, to mess with the minds of the owners. 

The thrill he derived from leaving half-drunk bottles of beer around and rearranging furniture soon wore off, however, and the urge to escalate to the next level became too irresistible. He was scaring people, making them feel uneasy in their own homes, but he wasn’t experiencing their fear firsthand. 

His infatuation with 15-year-old Annie Andrews in 1986, and her rejection of him, was the catalyst that set him on the darkest road imaginable. And one of the strangest. 

Contacting her out of the blue, he explained that a mutual friend from school had given him her number, which was a lie. All that he knew about her, including her phone number and even what she looked like, was attained when he broke into her family home, snooped around, and became obsessed with her from a photo. 

Over the next couple of weeks, they talked regularly on the phone, LaPlante consoling her over the loss of her mother to cancer, working his way into her confidences. It wasn’t long before he asked her out on a date.  

Like any teenage girl her age, Annie was excited to be going on her first date, a trip to the local fair, no less. That excitement turned to disappointment when the suitor who turned up on her doorstep was not tall, well-built, and blond like she was expecting, but was short, scrawny, with dark greasy hair and acne that was winning the war taking place on his face. 

On the date, Annie felt uncomfortable from the start and called it off after an hour, finding him too weird for words. She had no intention of seeing him again. LaPlante had other ideas.  

A few days after the date, strange things began to happen in her household, but only when Annie’s father, Brian, was out, when she was alone or when she was with her younger 8-year-old sister, Jessica. Always in the dead of night. 

It started with a sound from behind the walls in the house, a gentle tapping sound, repetitive, coming from more than one place.  Their initial curiosity soon turned to annoyance, then a chilling feeling as the sounds became more consistent, seemingly following them as they moved from room to room.  

When the first note was found, “I’m in your room. Come and find me”, scrawled on the basement wall, the two young girls, alone in the house, became terrified.  

Their father at first thought his girls were playing games, seeking attention, until another message scrawled on the wall turned up seemingly out of thin air two weeks later, “I’m back. Find me if you can”. This was no joke, someone was entering the house undetected whenever they felt like it. 

And then out of the corner of his eye, he saw LaPlante. In his house. Standing in the hallway in a blond wig, holding a hatchet, make-up smeared across his face, looking weird as hell. 

They clashed, fought over the weapon, Brian eventually managing to subdue LaPlante until the police arrived. 

After he was arrested, a quick search to ascertain how he had entered the house unearthed the crawl space behind the walls where he had been living undetected right under the noses of the Andrews family.  

LaPlante was charged as a minor, being only 16 years old, and sentenced to 10 months in a juvenile detention center. While inside he turned 17 in May and after serving his time he was then scheduled to appear in court for a longer sentence as he was now classed as an adult. That allowed LaPlante to post bail, a get a get-out-of-jail card, and even though he had a court date set for December 11, he had no intention of turning up. 

Instead, he returned to what he knew best – breaking into homes. This time, however, he forewent the petty thievery, stealing two handguns instead. 

Now he had bigger plans in mind.  

On December 1 he set out on the half-mile walk to the house of the Gustafson’s, one of the handguns lodged in his belt. 

The husband, Andrew Gustafson, was at work, his pregnant wife, Priscilla, and his 5-year-old son, William, at home, his 7-year-old daughter, Abigail, soon to return from school. Christmas was just around the corner and decorations were already up and sparkling. 

Daniel LaPlante was not in the Christmassy mood, the blood in his veins running colder than the weather. 

When he broke into the house his mind was already set on what he was going to do, the bottled rage inside his soul boiling over after years of abuse, torment, and rejection. 

At gunpoint, he dragged the pregnant Priscilla Gustafson upstairs where he relentlessly beat her into submission, then raped her. Still not satisfied, madness lurking behind his eyes, he shoved a pillow over her face, placed the handgun into it, and pulled the trigger, twice. 

What he did next was beyond heinous. 

Grabbing the sobbing 5-year-old, he dragged him to the bathroom where he filled the bathtub then held him underwater until his panicked thrashing ceased. 

Going downstairs, he encountered Abigail who had just returned from school. By this time out of his mind, LaPlante proceeded to drown her in the bathroom downstairs. 

Then he left the house, the neighbors completely unaware of the horrors that had just transpired in their midst. The first thing they realized something was wrong, was when Andrew Gustafson returned to find an eerily quiet house that was usually filled with the laughter of his young children. And then, filled with dread, he fearfully climbed the stairs and found the body of his murdered wife. 

His anguished cries, and the ensuing police and ambulance sirens, reverberated around the neighborhood, shattering the calm of the evening. 

Daniel LaPlante became a suspect because items were missing from the house and he had recently been released on bail. The first time the police questioned him on December 2 was inconclusive, his alibis plausible, but not wholly convincing. With no real evidence, they went away yet sensed something was not quite right with his answers.   

When the police returned that same day for further follow-up questions, LaPlante panicked and ran. 

Within the next 24 hours, the manhunt closed in on him, tightening, a helicopter circling overhead, 50 officers on the ground, police dogs sniffing him out. Eventually, on 3 December at 6.30 pm, a tip led the police to where he was hiding in a dumpster 11 miles away, a handgun tucked into his waistband, a crazed smile plastered across his face. 

The case against LaPlante was overwhelming, indisputable, stolen items found in his mother’s house along with the murder weapon itself. When he was brought to court in October 1988, the constant smirk on his face, and the fact that he showed no remorse whatsoever, didn’t help his defense team in the slightest. 

After the trial, the jury deliberated for 5 hours before unanimously finding him guilty. The judge, himself horrified at the murders committed, sentenced the amused-looking LaPlante to three consecutive life sentences that included the charges in the case of the Andrews family. 

Daniel LaPlante will spend the rest of his life behind bars, but the devastation he left behind will last for much, much longer. It wasn’t just the murders that shocked the nation, but the creepy way he had terrified the Andrews family that struck a nerve, taunting them as he did from behind the walls in their own house. 

At least now he was incarcerated permanently behind bars, behind walls where he couldn’t come and go as he pleased, behind walls that would protect society from the monster he had become.

Who wouldn’t want to be living large in retirement, feet up, money in the bank, not a care in the world? 

For some people, retirement can be a dream come true when the mortgage is finally paid off, and if there is an unbelievable amount of money in the bank, it can be even sweeter. For the first time, hobbies can be pursued more frequently, and the freedom to travel to wherever and whenever the urge surges is an added benefit.  

Having worked from an early age, hard, Genaro M. from Madrid, at 84-years old, was the proud owner of 25 companies that grossed millions of euros every year. Those profits poured regularly into his 44 bank accounts, and one of his companies alone, Lacy Patrimonio S.L, had a share capital of €3.5 million. The properties he controlled, 28 in total, were all fully paid up, mortgage-free, and worth millions. 

Genaro wasn’t alone in reaping the benefits of a life long-lived. His Spanish compatriot, Eugenio C, was 89-years old, owned 264 companies and 134 properties, from luxury villas to commercial properties, and equally had bank accounts bursting at the seams with money. 

Jose Luis G., also in his eighties, may not have possessed the sheer wealth of the other two, but he still controlled 32 properties, both residential and commercial, had 32 top-of-the-range cars and two boats valued in excess of €500,000. His company, Sail Rent S.L, had assets of more than €2.4 million, so he wasn’t doing so bad for himself either. 

The man who had helped them amass all this enviable wealth was Garcia Crespo. He was a 65-year-old attorney who also lived in Madrid, a very affluent part of Madrid, and, like his three clients, Crespo was rolling in money and flashy cars. 

He controlled 30 properties, plots of land, and 53 bank accounts, again overflowing with cash. Because of his savvy business acumen, his three clients, as well as himself, were rich beyond their wildest dreams. 

Anyone looking on from the outside would wonder immediately why Genaro, Eugenio, and Jose Luis, with all the companies they owned, with all the properties they controlled, and all the bank accounts at their disposal, would be living in care homes on pensions of €286 to €675 per month. 

The lifestyle they were living on paper was not reflected in the life they were living in reality. 

Even Crespo’s declared official income didn’t reflect in any way, shape, or form, how he managed to have such an affluent lifestyle.  

So where was all the money coming from?  

That was exactly what the National Police, the Guardia Civil, and the revenue service were wondering. 

When the investigations started in 2018 it revealed a network that stretched from South America to Spain, to Sweden, to Poland and all the countries in between. This international network was in the business of selling drugs – hashish, cocaine, pills. And all those drugs generated enormous amounts of cash that had to be legitimized. That was where the octogenarians came in, and their system of cleaning that cash. 

But how had these pensioners gotten involved in laundering drug money in the first place? 

The operation, codenamed Operation Beautiful, amassed reams of photographs of these three company owners, as well as another three in similar nursing home scenarios, and quickly connected all of them to the one person they all had in common – the attorney, García Crespo. 

Not only that but all the companies, all the legal documents, all the property titles, were signed by all six pensioners in the same banks and notaries. 

On paper they were the owners, in reality, Crespo made sure that he had the power of attorney over each of his six recruits. It was his job to legitimize all the cash, and it was his idea to take advantage of the octogenarians who had nothing to lose living on the poverty line as they were. 

For their cooperation, each of them was paid an exorbitant fee of €100 for every company and bank account they signed for.  

It wasn’t a great deal of money, far from it, but considering that between them they owned, at least on paper, 387 companies, 414 properties in Madrid alone, and close to 300 bank accounts, it amounted to a tidy income for them on a regular basis, especially as the company was continually accruing assets. 

Not one of them considered the legal implications of what they were doing, not one of them considered that they may be legally liable in a court of law. Unfortunately, ignorance is never a good defense strategy and all a jury would see would be the facts. In the eyes of the law, they were the legal owners of companies that legitimized drug money and that they owned properties bought by the illegal profits of those drugs, and that they had bank accounts where the freshly laundered money was stashed. 

In the eyes of the law, they were as guilty as the drug runners. But the police agencies weren’t interested in arresting six old-age pensioners. What they wanted was the head of the international drug trafficking syndicate. They wanted Juan Andrés Cabeza. 

By profession, he was a car salesman. He sold luxury cars and had a few parked in the garage of his penthouse in the exclusive area of Costa Brava, a penthouse that was valued at over €2 million. But selling cars alone didn’t fund his extravagant lifestyle of expensive suits, exclusive parties, 5-star holidays, Rolex watches. That all came from the drugs that he imported from South America and Europe and distributed throughout Spain, sometimes hidden in the cars he delivered nationwide. 

He was completely unaware, just like the pensioners and Crespo, that he was under close surveillance, his phones bugged, every conversation recorded, an airtight case being built against him. 

Those listening devices helped peel back the layers of how the international drug trafficking network functioned. The recordings revealed bribes at the seaports and crooked cops on the payroll. Trackers were secreted on cars, agents were placed on the ground to follow the movements of the main players and the unscrupulous individuals who supported the criminal enterprise that operated from Alicante to Valencia to Galicia. 

By September 2019 enough evidence was collected to start making arrests. The investigating agencies closed in, scooped up everyone involved, including Garcia Crespo, the octogenarians, 81 suspects, and, of course, Juan Andrés Cabeza. Internationally, arrests were made in Romania, Sweden, Bulgaria, Albania, and several as far away as Colombia. 

Operation Beautiful had smashed one of the biggest drug trafficking organizations in the Mediterranean. They confiscated properties, luxury cars, guns, expensive watches, yachts, €2.19 million in cash, froze 800 checking accounts holding millions more, and drugs, hashish, and cocaine. A drone was also seized that was used to smuggle drugs to Spain from Morocco.  

It was a major success for all the agencies that had cooperated internationally on the investigation, one of the biggest busts of a drugs ring in Europe. 

Garcia Crespo, the attorney, was accused of laundering €3.7 million through the 53 bank accounts in his own name and through the dozens of properties that he owned. 

The octogenarians were in a state of shock. Genaro M, 84 years old, Eugenio C, 89 years old, and Jose Luis C, couldn’t believe that they were at the center of a multi-national drugs network. When questioned they explained as best as they could that they knew nothing about any drugs, even less about laundering money. They were just simple pensioners. 

They didn’t understand these things, were just old men, and had simply signed where the attorney had told them to. Garcia Crespo had, they stated, taken advantage of their impoverished situations and used them for his illegal purposes without their knowledge. Surely, they weren’t going to be sent to prison. 

When the story broke in the news, the court of public opinion chimed in. A large majority of them reasoned that there was no way that a judge, presented with the five surviving 80- to 90-year-old men, was going to give them a prison term under these circumstances. 

Any decent lawyer would present them as frail old men with more time behind them than in front, the sands of time running out on each of them.

Time will tell as the case is still ongoing. 

But who’s to say that maybe, just maybe, the 80s Laundry Gang were actually the brains behind the whole operation.  

Maybe Genaro, Eugenio, and Jose Luis were having the last laugh on everyone with more money, flash cars, and luxury properties hidden away for a rainy day so that, in the end, finally, they would enjoy their retirement in true style, and sail off into the sunset?  

You never know…

A shocking tale of atheism, gold coins, kidnappings, extortions, and brutal murders.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair was not a product of her birth, her heritage, her upbringing. She was an anomaly in her family with her father being of Irish- Scottish ethnicity and her mother having the blood of Germany running through her veins. Both of them were religious.  

Born on April 13, 1919, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Madalyn had an older brother, Jon Irwin Junior (Irv), and was baptized at the age of four. It was her religious beliefs, or the lack of them, that were going to play a pivotal role in her later life.  

While in her teens her family moved to Ohio. There she graduated high school in 1936, got married, then served in the second world war in Italy for a few years, got divorced, and had two children, William J. Murray III with an officer she had served with, and then Jon Garth Murray in 1954 in a short-lived relationship with Michael Fiorillo. 

At this stage, she wasn’t known as The Most Hated Woman in America, but that was about to change. 

Now, no one sets out to be reviled by millions. No one wants to be hated by millions. Madalyn Murray O’Hair was no exception, but that was to be her fate. 

Up to that point, her life hadn’t been anything remarkable, despite trying to emigrate unsuccessfully to Russia in 1960. The turning point came about from something as innocuous as taking her son, William, to re-enroll in Woodbourne Junior High School in Baltimore where she now lived. 

It wasn’t the fact that the students had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance that bothered her, that got her hackles up, but the fact that they had to engage in prayers as well. Madalyn was an atheist and, when the school refused her request to excuse her son from the mandated prayers, decided to do something about it. 

First, she pulled him out of the school, second, she took the Baltimore School System to court. 

Her complaint stated that mandatory bible reading was unconstitutional, that it shouldn’t be forced on students. The US Supreme Court agreed with her and, in 1963 she got the ruling in her favor. That resulted in the nationwide ban on state-sponsored religious Bible reading and prayers in public schools. It was a huge win, and with it came consequences. 

The backlash against her was venal, brutal, dangerously hostile, and she was forced to leave Baltimore for Honolulu, Hawaii, with her sons, Susan, her son Bill’s girlfriend, and her new grandchild, Robin. 

After that victory, she founded the American Atheists organization and went on to file numerous lawsuits across the country for the separation of church and state, and even went on to launch the American Atheist Magazine. Her notoriety exploded further across America as she became more prominent, appearing on talk shows, holding debates with religious figures, and even launching her own radio station, the principal theme to criticize religion.  

This further led to her own television show, the American Atheist Forum, which was fairly popular and brought in healthy donations from her expanding followers. Anyone who was religious, however, who did not appreciate her views that religion was a crutch, was irrational, was superstitious and was supernatural nonsense, came to hate her without prejudice.  

It was this notoriety that earned her the name of The Most Hated Woman in America. 

Death threats were the norm, stones thrown through her windows, and physical intimidation were regular occurrences. But Madalyn stuck to her principles and the organization grew to become a nationwide movement, its membership swelling throughout the next few decades. 

In 1986, her son, Garth, took over the reins publicly, while she remained the power behind the throne. Her other son, William J. Murray, had become an outcast by this time, a pariah to her as he had found religion, converted to Christianity, and even became a Baptist minister. She disowned him completely, ashamed. 

Still, the organization was thriving, was as popular as ever, championing the causes of non-believers. 

On August 27, 1995, Madalyn, now 76, Garth who was 40 years old, and Robin at 30, who she had legally adopted, disappeared from the face of the planet, along with hundreds of thousands of dollars taken from the accounts of American Atheist. 

What remained in their place was a note, typed, simply stating that the trio had had to leave for an emergency situation. 

But then things went from strange to stranger. 

Garth and Robin contacted several of their employees over the next month, voices strained, muted, something amiss. They offered nothing in the way of where they were, when they would be back, nothing. From Madalyn there was no word.  

During this period, Garth ordered $600,000 worth of gold coins from a dealer in San Antonio. In the end, he collected only $400,000 worth. 

On September 28 all communications ceased. 

Concerned that maybe a scandal was about to blow up in their faces, especially since the IRS was enquiring about $1.5 million in unpaid taxes, and worried for the safety of the missing leaders, the senior staff in the organization contacted the FBI. 

Despite these concerns, the FBI had very little to go on to suggest that there was any foul play involved in the trio’s disappearance. They interviewed employees, both past and present, suspected several who had shady pasts but came up with no solid leads. 

The trail went cold, was petering off into nothing, no leads, no suspects, not even any motives. 

If it wasn’t for an article in the Express-News a year later in August 1996 by a reporter, John MacCormack, the disappearance of Madalyn, Gareth, and Robin, would have faded away into history, another unsolved crime, if a crime it was. 

The unraveling began with a body. A dead one. The corpse in question belonged to Danny Fry. At first, it was difficult to ascertain his identification due to the fact that his head and hands were not where they should be. 

It wasn’t until 1998 before the reporter was able to string together enough information to make a coherent case, and maybe figure out who had put several bullets into Fry’s body and lopped off his head and hands. The suspect list surprisingly wasn’t that long. 

One of the major breakthroughs came from a tipster who claimed to be a family member concerned about Fry. He gave the reporter a name, someone who had enlisted Fry for a job, a job that required a gun, and his silence.  

Like a bloodhound, MacCormack was on the trail again, reinvigorated to unravel the mystery of where the O’Hairs were, who had killed Fry, and what happened to the $400,000 worth of gold coins. At the center of his investigation was the name he had been given, that of David Waters, a man with theft, murder, and an eight-year prison sentence in his past, and nothing bright on the horizon of his future. 

When MacCormack interviewed him about the O’Hairs, Waters commented that they were probably basking in the sun somewhere living the high life from the monies they had pilfered. 

The reporter didn’t buy it for a second, especially when his investigation revealed that Waters had stolen $54,000 from the American Atheist organization back in 1993. Stonewalled, but not giving up, he unearthed another name, Gary Paul Karr, who had links to both Waters and the mutilated body of Danny Fry.  

At this stage MacCormack couldn’t go any further as he had no access to Karr to interview him, so handed all his evidence over to the FBI. To them, Karr, who hadn’t long been released from a thirty-year sentence for kidnapping, had no option but to answer their questions. At first, though, he was reluctant to say anything, thinking that they were fishing.  

When presented with all the evidence and dots they had joined together, it didn’t take long for him to realize that he was jammed up in a corner with nowhere to go.  

From the subsequent confession, a search warrant was easily granted, and the ensuing raid on the home of David Waters revealed guns, ammunition, handcuffs, a shovel, and crucially, a Browning 9mm pistol. 

Waters and his girlfriend were arrested for kidnapping, extortion, and murder, their crimes motivated by hate, revenge, and greed. 

It unfolded that Waters simply didn’t like Madalyn, in fact, hated her with a vengeance. When the kidnapping idea was hatched between him and Karr, Fry was brought in to help as they needed a third man to pull it off.  

The three of them planned the kidnapping of Madalyn, Garth, and Robin to get their hands on as much money as they could, and get rid of someone Waters despised. $600,000 was the amount they had in mind, easier to split three ways. 

Madalyn, Garth, and Robin were snatched up at gunpoint and held for a month at the Warren Inn in San Antonio. From there Garth and Robin made the calls and arranged for the ransom money. Unfortunately, Garth only picked up $400,000, with no way to collect the further $200,000. 

Incensed, his hatred of Madalyn finally boiling over, Waters changed location to the nearby La Quinta hotel. Once there, he, Karr, and Fry strangled their hostages to death. All three bodies were disposed of. 

But there was a further problem that hadn’t initially been anticipated by the two main cohorts, Waters and Karr – that $400,000 didn’t split too well three ways. After a night out drinking, celebrating, they turned on Fry, shot him dead, and discarded his body in the East Fork Trinity River in Dallas County, minus his head and hands. 

Karr quickly confessed when he was arrested for kidnapping, extortion, and multiple murders. In a plea deal for a reduced sentence of 20 years, Waters agreed to lead the FBI to where they had buried the O’Hairs and Danny Fry’s head and hands. Both men received lengthy sentences, but Waters died in prison in 2003 of lung cancer. 

The mystery, and the whole sordid scheme, was finally solved, with family members’ fears put to rest, and the American Atheist society able to continue its crusade. 

As for its once famous-former founder…Well, Madalyn Murray O’Hair may well have been The Most Hated Woman in America, but even she didn’t deserve to be murdered for a few pieces of gold.