Hence as long as one believes that the evil man wears horns, one will not discover an evil man.
—Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
8
The Blood Drinker Next Door
Sitting like a pale specter in the dark sky, the gibbous moon wanes high overhead as you make your way through the twisting streets of the neighborhood. In another twenty minutes you’ll be back at home sitting in front of the television watching your favorite sitcom and thinking about work tomorrow. For now the crisp air muffles the sounds of your cadence, and the occasional noise of a distant dog barking is the only thing that seems to break the silence. Rounding Elm Street you quicken the pace, knowing that you’re about to enter a section that most other residents shy away from even during the daylight. Weed-choked lots spring up where houses once stood, and the few that do remain sit like quiet sleepers with their shades tightly drawn.
A twisted wrought-iron fence begins on your left, and although you would rather not look, you still glimpse the forms of the fading tombstones and moldering crypts beyond that make up Oakwood Cemetery. Of course as an adult you don’t believe in ghosts or other such nonsense, but the place does have its share of creepy tales, and walking past it at night alone does nothing to keep the hairs on the back of your neck from standing up. Moving your legs faster, you break into a nervous run past the massive gates that mark its entrance until you round another corner, losing it from sight. With aching lungs and burning muscles you eventually slow to a walk again, giving yourself time to get your heart back under control. Now that the fear is gone, you cannot help but smile at the thought of how childish it all seems. You blame your grandmother for filling your head with all those stories about vampires lurking around cemeteries just waiting to pounce on naughty little children.
Lost in your thoughts, you hardly notice the car coming up from behind until it pulls to a stop next to you. Its murky interior seems impenetrable in the darkness, and just as your brain begins to flash its warning signals the window rolls down and out pops the smiling face of your next-door neighbor, Mr. Johnson.
“Out for an evening stroll, I see,” he beams at you.
“Ye … yes,” you stutter in obvious relief. “But I’m a little winded right now.”
“Well, by all means, then, hop in, and I’ll give you a ride home,” he offers.
You hesitate at first, looking back to the bend that leads past the cemetery once more. After all, he is your next-door neighbor, right? You’ve seen him going to church on Sundays; he always keeps his yard nice; and he has a wife and kids. Bending low to enter the dark car, you think how lucky you are not to have to run past that creepy cemetery again, never realizing that the real monster is sitting in the seat next to you, smiling and adjusting the mirror as he pulls away from the curb and drives off into the night.
Days later the authorities will find your lifeless body, drained of all its blood, in a ditch not far from the cemetery, and although they have no suspects the local paper will run sinister headlines such as “Vampire Killer on the Loose,” or “Body Found Drained of Blood.” Not long afterwards, Mr. Johnson will be out in his yard pruning his rose bushes, and a neighbor will stroll by and make small talk before commenting on what a tragedy it is that someone from the block was murdered. Then Mr. Johnson will pause, smile his toothy grin, and say, “Why, yes, whoever did such a thing must be a real monster indeed.”
Throughout our ghoulish examination of the vampire, we’ve traveled to many exotic lands and delved deep into the past to hunt down some of the world’s most notorious blood drinkers. During this journey we’ve encountered some of the creature’s most frightening incarnations, but as impossible as it seems, we have yet to examine one of its most insidious— and therefore most dangerous—forms.
The worst of these infernal monsters do not have fangs, rest in graves during the day, or run screaming from crucifixes; nor do they have Hollywood movies made about them. Instead, they hold normal jobs, live in quiet neighborhoods, pay their taxes, and drive fuel-efficient cars. They live not on the fringe of society creeping around graveyards at night, but rather they hide in broad daylight, making themselves indistinguishable from the rest of us. The most diabolical vampires are not those whispered about in the superstitions of Eastern European peasantry, but rather the ones who live right next door to you.
Fritz Haarmann
Take, for example, the infamous Fritz Heinrich Karl Haarmann, whom the German press came in the 1920s to dub the “Vampire of Hannover.” Born in the city of Hannover in Lower Saxony on October 25, 1879, Haarmann was the unassuming sixth child of a stern and impoverished German family. In fact, there is little to say at all about his early life until 1898, when he came to the attention of authorities after he was arrested on the charge of child molestation. In lieu of prison, however, doctors found him mentally unfit to stand trial and transferred him to a psychiatric intuition, where he stayed a few brief months before escaping and fleeing across the border into Switzerland.
After several years on the run, Haarmann returned to Germany and enlisted in the army under an alias; yet despite being listed as a good soldier, he was discharged in 1903 with neurasthenia, an early medical term for mental exhaustion. Haarmann returned to Hannover, where the authorities incredulously seemed to have forgotten all about his past, and for the next decade he found himself in and out of jail for petty crimes ranging from theft to fraud. During this period his run-ins with the police allowed him the advantage of becoming a low-level informant, which he later used to deflect their attention away from his own activities. In addition to his criminal activities, he also learned a trade as a butcher and opened a shop in the seamy underbelly of the city’s Old Quarter, where few questions were ever asked and even fewer answers given.
It wasn’t until September of 1918, however, during a time when Germany languished under a harsh economic depression just weeks before its conclusive defeat in World War I, that he committed the first of a long string of murders by taking the life of a seventeen-year-old boy named Friedel Rothe. At the time police knew only that the boy had gone missing and was last seen in Haarmann’s company, but when Friedel’s family began clamoring for answers, officials raided Haarmann’s apartment, where they found Haarmann with a semi-naked, underage boy. Although no evidence surfaced as to Friedel’s whereabouts, Haarmann was charged with the sexual assault of the young boy found in his apartment and sentenced to nine months in prison.
A year later and back on the streets of Hannover, Haarmann met a young runaway named Hans Grans, who was working as a male prostitute. The two became lovers and moved into Haarmann’s old apartment together, where Haarmann hatched the deadly scheme of luring runaways back to their quarters to be stripped of their belongings and murdered. He put the plan into action by prowling the railway stations at night looking for destitute boys sleeping on the platforms. After finding one he was attracted to, he would awaken him with a forceful nudge of his boot, and under the guise of being a station manager or rail detective demand to see his ticket.
If the boy was unable to produce a ticket (which was usually the case), Haarmann feigned sympathy for his plight and invited the boy back to his apartment, where Haarmann filled him with food, wine, and the promise of a warm bed. Once the boy’s head was swimming with too much alcohol, Haarmann sprang his trap, and with a sudden leap he would grab the boy from behind, tearing open the boy’s throat with his teeth, then raping him and drinking his blood.
Haarmann would later clean up the evidence, pawn the victim’s belongings, and butcher the body to be sold as salted pork on the black market, in what can only be compared in gruesomeness to something from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. What portions proved not to be disposable Haarmann weighed down with rocks and dumped into the nearby Leine River, which in June of 1924 led to his undoing after a bag of human remains washed ashore. After dragging the river for days, the police discovered nearly five hundred human bones belonging to what they believed were twenty-two separate victims.
Given Haarmann’s history as a sexual predator in the community and his questionable involvement in the disappearance of Friedel Rothe, he became number one on their list of suspects and was placed under constant surveillance. Authorities would not have to wait long, though. True to his nature, he was soon arrested for trying to lure yet another teenaged boy back to his apartment. In a search of his residence, police were horrified to find its walls splattered with blood and items belonging to his victims neatly kept as souvenirs.
Under interrogation, Haarmann estimated he had murdered as many as fifty to seventy young boys (he would be convicted of murdering twenty-four), referring to them in his shocking confession as “game,” and went on to implicate his accomplice Hans Grans in the crimes as well. The trial that followed became a sensation across Germany, and on December 19, 1924, Fritz Haarmann was convicted of twenty-four separate counts of murder and sentenced to death. While he oddly pleaded to be decapitated with a long sword in the town market, his life was instead ended four months later under a guillotine’s blade behind the walls of Hannover prison. His brain was removed and shipped to the Göttingen Medical Hospital for study, where it rests to this day in a jar of formaldehyde. Initially Hans Grans was also sentenced to death, but after a second trial his penalty was reduced to twelve years, and he died in Hannover in 1975.
Béla Kiss
While Fritz Haarmann was still alive and stalking the cobblestone streets of Hannover, another monster was plying his bloody trade in a land not far to the east. For all intents and purposes, Béla Kiss appeared on the surface to be nothing more than a simple tinsmith. Although few facts are known about his early life, we do know that he was born in 1877, and in 1900 he moved into a rented cottage in Cinkota, just outside of Budapest, Hungary, where he set up shop as a tradesman.
Well liked by everyone in the town, Béla Kiss was a self-taught man who spent large amounts of time reading anything he could get his hands on. He also had quite the reputation as a ladies’ man, and a number of attractive women were seen in his company from time to time. While the envy of most men, married or not, it was equally noticeable that his female companions didn’t seem to last long, and before anyone knew it, they were gone.
In 1914 war broke out, and at the age of thirty-seven Béla Kiss joined the Hungarian army and marched off to the battlefields of Europe along with most of the other men from the town. As the news from the front remained grim, many in town guessed that he, like countless others, must have ended up either dead in a muddy trench somewhere or a prisoner of war. His landlord, reasoning he would surely never return, remembered that Béla Kiss had kept a number of large drums behind his house that he claimed were for storing petrol.
Hoping to profit from the abandoned cache, the landlord punctured one of the drums, but instead of the smell of gasoline he was greeted with the overpowering odor of rotting flesh. Fearing the worst he called in the local police, who led by Detective Chief Charles Nagy removed the drum’s lid and found the naked body of a young woman preserved in wood alcohol. Six more drums were opened, and in each the same gruesome sight awaited. Later autopsies revealed that each of the women had been strangled to death with a rope, but lending an even more macabre element to the case was that they all had two small puncture marks on their necks and were completely drained of blood.
With this discovery Detective Nagy and his men combed the rest of the house and property, finding an additional seventeen bodies, all of which bore the same causes of death and evidence of exsanguination. Some were buried about the yard while others were simply stacked like cord wood in a nearby tool shed. In one part of the house, officials even found a secret room containing countless letters between Béla Kiss and numerous women. By the looks of it, Detective Nagy surmised, the silver-tongued Kiss had been enticing women to his home for years with promises of marriage and then murdering them.
Catching such a clever killer proved harder than police could ever have imagined, however, since Béla Kiss was presumed killed or captured on the front. Nagy alerted the military nonetheless and ordered the arrest of Kiss, but on October 4, 1916, he received a letter from the commandant of a Serbian hospital with the news that his fugitive had died of typhoid. Initially it seemed that the “Monster of Cinkota” had escaped justice, but soon after the first letter a second correspondence arrived from the hospital stating that a mistake had been made and that he was alive after all and recuperating. With the news in hand, military officials rushed to the infirmary ward only to find that the body in his bed was not that of Béla Kiss, but rather a soldier who had died shortly before. It appeared that Kiss was tipped off somehow and substituted a dead body for his own before disappearing.
For years the Hungarian police continued to receive sightings of Béla Kiss from around Europe and even from as far away as America. Some claimed that he had been jailed in Romania for theft, others that he died of yellow fever in Turkey. In the 1920s he was said to be a soldier in the French Foreign Legion, and in 1932 he was even reportedly spotted in Times Square, New York, working as a janitor. In each of these cases the reports were either untrue or the suspect vanished prior to questioning, and the trail went cold. Who exactly Béla Kiss was, where he went, and why he drained his victims of their blood in such a peculiar manner are answers that are forever lost to us.
Richard Chase
If one were to assume that such vile acts were only committed by people who lived long ago, one would be dangerously wrong. A more modern case is that of Richard Trenton Chase, the “Vampire of Sacramento,” who in late 1977 and early 1978 murdered six innocent people and drank their blood. While Chase’s life started off as normally as any other, he began showing signs of mental illness in early adolescence, including a bizarre hypochondria concerned with the functioning of his internal organs. By adulthood he was abusing drugs and alcohol frequently and had developed a curious obsession for consuming blood, based on the delusion that if he did not, his body would disintegrate.
In 1975 this psychosis led to his hospitalization with blood poisoning after injecting rabbit’s blood into his veins. Following a psychiatric examination, Chase was admitted to a mental institution called the Beverly Manor. During his stay at the “Manor,” he freely shared with doctors his morbid fantasies of killing animals and drinking their blood and earned the nickname Dracula after staff found dead birds in his room and fresh blood around his mouth. After a year of observation, counseling, and psychotropic medication, doctors were convinced he was no longer a threat and released him to his parents’ conservatorship. Back on the streets, however, his overprotective mother had a different opinion on her son’s course of treatment, and without his doctor’s knowledge she moved him into an apartment of his own and began weaning him off his medication.
This of course proved disastrous, and before long Richard Chase was spiraling down into madness and bloodlust once again. On August 3, 1977, officers of the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation found Chase wandering nude and covered in blood. Not far away they discovered his Ford Ranchero stuck in the sand with several rifles, a pile of men’s clothing, and a liver (which was determined to belong to a cow) in the front seat. Although Chase was not arrested or charged with any crime, the incident proved a sinister prelude of the violence yet to come.
Months later he took his first victim when he drove by the East Sacramento home of fifty-one-year-old Edward Griffin and shot him dead while he was unloading groceries from his car. Law enforcement’s lack of headway in the murder only seemed to fuel Chase’s psychosis, and over the next month he randomly killed five more people. When later asked by FBI agents how he chose his victims, Chase explained that he merely walked down the street testing whether or not people had locked their front doors. If they were locked, he recounted, he knew he was not welcome and so he moved on to the next house.
The last of his murders occurred on January 27, 1978, when he entered the home of thirty-eight-year-old Evelyn Miroth in the middle of the day. In the rampage that followed, Evelyn Miroth; her friend Danny Meredith; Evelyn’s six-year-old son, Jason; and her twenty-two-month-old nephew were shot to death with a .22 caliber handgun. After mutilating the corpses and drinking their blood, Chase engaged in necrophilia with Evelyn’s body. Startled by a knock at the door, Chase fled the scene, but not before leaving a trail of forensic evidence that quickly led to his arrest. While he was in custody, police searched his apartment, which they reported looked more like a slaughterhouse than a domicile; blood covered everything from the furniture in the living room to the food in the refrigerator. Even more ominous was the discovery of a calendar marking the dates of his murders, with forty-one more planned in the year to come.
On May 8, 1979, Richard Chase was found guilty of six counts of murder in the first degree and sentenced to die in the California gas chamber. But before his sentence could be carried out, he escaped justice by taking his own life. At the age of thirty, the “Vampire of Sacramento” was found dead in his cell in San Quentin from an overdose of antidepressants he had allegedly been saving for weeks.
James Riva
Despite the fact that the men mentioned so far in this chapter became known for their propensity to drink or drain their victims of blood, none of these killers actually considered themselves vampires in the literal sense. Yet there have been some blood drinkers who have cast themselves in the mantle of the vampire and committed unspeakable acts of savagery to pursue their need for blood.
On April 10, 1980, twenty-two-year-old James Riva of Marshfield, Massachusetts, shot and killed his handicapped grandmother with bullets he painted gold. After trying to drink the blood from her wounds, he dosed her body in antifreeze and gasoline and set it on fire. When he later confessed his crime to police, he defended his actions by claiming self-defense. His grandmother, he maintained, was a vampire who had been secretly poisoning his food and using an ice pick while he slept to drink his blood. According to Riva’s delusion, everyone in the world was covertly a vampire but himself and if he killed and drank the blood of another, he, too, would become a vampire and all the other vampires would throw him a party.
Fascinated with vampires from the age of thirteen, Riva began displaying signs of mental illness from an early age and was known to obsess over drawing pictures depicting acts of violence and gore. In time this urge led to his killing and drinking the blood of small animals. During his pretrial psychiatric review, he also reported that he kept an axe near his bedroom door and that he planned to kill his father with it one day.
Although his defense attorneys brought in a host of psychiatric doctors who diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, he was nonetheless found guilty of second-degree murder and arson and sentenced to life in prison. On August 4, 2009, James Riva went before the Massachusetts state parole board after twenty-nine years of incarceration and testified that he was rehabilitated and ready for release back into society. Prison officials were not as convinced, however, and stated that he could not be trusted off of his medication. During an incident they recounted, Riva attacked a prison guard who he believed was sneaking into his cell at night and stealing his spinal fluid. Subsequently, Riva was not granted parole.
Allan Menzies
Although James Riva feared the thought of vampires, his crimes, according to his faulty reasoning, were actually intended to make him one of them, demonstrating that for some the lure of the vampire can be exceedingly strong, turning a mild interest into a deadly desire. Take, for example, the well-publicized case of twenty-two-year-old Allan Menzies of Fauldhouse, West Lothian, Scotland, who in December of 2002 killed his childhood friend of eighteen years and drank his blood, believing that doing so would make him an immortal vampire.
Prior to the killing, Menzies became engrossed in the vampire film Queen of the Damned, adapted from a novel by Anne Rice. In it, the scantily clad vampire queen Akasha rises from her ancient slumber to feed not only on the blood of the living but on the blood of her fellow vampires as well. Fixated on the film and its main character, Menzies spent long periods of time locked in his room watching the movie over and over again. His father later told police that he often heard his son talking to himself while alone in his room and that on more than one occasion he began shouting as if in a heated argument with someone. During the periods when Menzies did venture out of his room, which were becoming less frequent, he was consumed with talking about roleplaying games and vampires and often spoke as if the character Akasha were a real person.
Then, on December 11, 2002, twenty-one-year-old Thomas McKendrick disappeared after last being seen in the Menzies’ home. That same day, Allan Menzies’ father returned from work to find suspicious bloodstains throughout the house, which Allan explained occurred after he sliced his hand opening a can of dog food. Although Menzies’ father seemed satisfied with this explanation, the Scottish police were not, but with no evidence of foul play there was little that could be done. That is, until a few weeks later when what started as a missing person’s case suddenly escalated into murder after the decomposing body of McKendrick was discovered buried in a shallow grave in the forest not far from the Menzies home. The autopsy revealed that McKendrick had been brutally stabbed forty-two times in the face, neck, and shoulders, and had been beaten repeatedly with a hammer-like object.
The police were quick to respond and immediately took Allan Menzies into custody, where they questioned him about the death of his friend McKendrick. To their surprise Menzies made no pretense at duplicity and readily admitted to murdering his friend, calmly recounting the events as they unfolded on the day in question. According to Menzies’ statement, the two men were talking in the kitchen of the Menzies home when McKendrick made a lewd comment about the actress who played Akasha in the film Queen of the Damned. Menzies, who was slicing a raw liver at the time, took a large bowie knife and attacked his friend, stabbing him and then beating him with a hammer until long after he stopped moving. When the act was finished, Menzies drank two cups’ worth of blood from the wounds of his dead friend and ate a small piece of his brain. During the killing, he claimed, his beloved vampire queen looked on, encouraging his murderous actions.
In their search of the crime scene, police found a copy of the movie Queen of the Damned and a frayed vampire novel, Blood and Gold by Anne Rice. In the book were scribbled numerous handwritten notes by Menzies pointing to something far more than just a simple case of jealous murder, including one that read, “The master will come for me and he has promised to make me immortal … I have chosen my fate to become a vampire, blood is much too precious to be wasted on humans … the blood is the life, I have drank the blood, and it shall be mine for I have seen horror” (Robertson 2003).
In court Menzies pled guilty to culpable homicide on the grounds of diminished responsibility, but the crown rejected his plea and ordered him to stand trial before the high court in Edinburgh, where he was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of eighteen years. In November of 2004 he was found dead in his cell at Shotts Prison of an apparent suicide.
Daniel and Manuela Ruda
Noticeably, while most of those mentioned in this chapter acted alone (although Haarmann had an accomplice to hide the evidence, he nevertheless committed the murders by himself), there are rare occasions when blood drinkers commit their crimes in concert with one another. On January 31, 2002, a young husband and wife were convicted in a German court of law for the murder of a thirty-three-year-old man named Frank Hackert in the town of Witten. According to court records, the two lured the unsuspecting man to their apartment under the pretense of a party and stabbed him to death. When the deed was finished, they ritualistically carved a pentagram on his chest and drank his blood before falling asleep together in a coffin next to his body.
Daniel Ruda and his wife, Manuela, first met through the personals in a heavy metal magazine called Metal-Hammer, where he placed an ad reading, “Black-haired vampire seeks princess of darkness who despises everything and everybody and has bidden farewell to life” (Rowlatt 2002).
Although both were avowed Satanists, they were also participating members of the vampyre community. Manuela claimed that, at the age of fourteen, the devil first began speaking to her and reassuring her that he had chosen her for something special. A few years later she left her hometown of Witten and traveled to the Scottish Highlands, where she spent her time wandering lonely graveyards and absorbing the gloomy atmosphere. For a while she even lived in a cave on the isolated Isle of Skye. She also lived in London, where she worked in a popular gothic club. It was here that she joined her first vampyre coven and began attending “bite parties,” developing a taste for human blood.
During the trial the defendants showed little regard for their victim’s family and often acted out in front of the press with rude gestures and strange antics, turning the whole affair into a media circus. Manuela even insisted at one point that the judge blacken the windows of the courtroom to hide the sun; a request he denied, of course. Nonetheless, the publicity that followed the deadly couple turned them into overnight media personalities, and fan mail from deranged fans flooded into the jail where they were being kept.
Both Daniel and Manuela admitted to the murder but refused to plead guilty, on the grounds that they were only following the orders of their master Lucifer and were therefore not to blame. They went on to recount that after the murder they planned to commit suicide in a cemetery and send their souls to hell, where they would be granted an exalted place among the damned. Instead, they were captured by police outside a gas station, armed with a chainsaw that they planned to use to further their body count.
Psychiatric experts diagnosed the two with a severe narcissistic personality disorder, and predicted that if freed they would undoubtedly kill again. Despite this obvious assessment of their future intentions, the German court only gave Daniel and Manuela Ruda fifteen and thirteen years respectively, and committed them to a hospital for the criminally insane.
The Others
Although the handful of cases examined thus far certainly represent a fair sampling of crimes committed by the most dangerous blood drinkers, they still only touch on a small portion of the bloody acts carried out through history. Other dark examples include:
• Martin Dumollard, a Frenchman who killed and drank the blood of several girls in the mid-nineteenth century.
• Eusebius Pieydagnelle, who killed six women in France in 1878, after the smell of blood from a nearby butcher’s shop excited him.
• Joseph Vacher, who drank the blood of a dozen murder victims in southeastern France in the 1890s.
• The “Monster of Düsseldorf,” Peter Kürten, who in the late 1920s committed thirteen murders. He drank the blood of many of his victims.
• Magdalena Solís, the “High Priestess of Blood,” who in the early 1960s convinced villagers in Mexico that she was an Inca goddess and instigated numerous blood rituals involving the murders of eight people.
• The “Podlaski Vampire,” Julian Koltun, who in the early 1980s raped, murdered, and drank the blood of a number of women.
• John Crutchley, the so-called “Vampire Rapist,” who in Florida in 1985 held a teenaged girl prisoner in order to rape her and drain her of blood, which he drank.
• Andrei Chikatilo, a sadistic serial killer who murdered over fifty people in the former Soviet Union from 1978 to 1990. In some of these murders, he confessed to eating his victims’ body parts and drinking their blood.
• Marcelo Costa de Andrade, the “Vampire of Niterói,” who in the early 1990s killed fourteen young boys in Rio de Janeiro and drank their blood in order to become as “young and pretty” as they were.
• Deborah Jean Finch, a woman living in Santa Cruz, California, who murdered and drank the blood of a man named Brandon McMichaels in 1991.
• Joshua Rudiger, the “Vampire Slasher,” who killed a homeless woman in San Francisco, and injured three homeless men, all by slashing their necks in order to imbibe their blood. Rudiger believed he was a 2,600-year-old vampire.
This list could go on until there is no more stomach for it, as more join the ranks of those before them. But as frightening as it truly is, the most dangerous men and women are those who have plied their bloody trade unnoticed and have therefore failed to make the list. Again and again, the thirst for blood has cut across time, culture, and even gender, suggesting that the preoccupation harkens back through history to humanity’s earliest beginnings.
As we have seen, even in our enlightened age of sensibility and access to information, there are still some who hunt their fellow man like solitary beasts preying on the weak and unsuspecting. There are also some who have immersed themselves in the vampire mythology to the point of committing unspeakable acts against humanity in the belief that they too will share in the mystery and darkness that is the vampire. Although reasons and methods vary from killer to killer, the twisted aim is the same: to taste human blood and the age-old forbidden power that courses through it.