Top 10 Bizarre and Brutal Criminals Cases
10.
Man Plots His Own Shooting to Get Ex Back
Boy meets girl.
Boy loses girl.
Boy hires someone to shoot him so he can get girl back.
That’s pretty much the plot for this 2011 Wisconsin case.
A heartbroken Jordan Cardella tried to win his ex back by getting himself shot, thinking
that seeing him laid up in a hospital bed would make her run back into his arms.
After talking over plans with friend Anthony Woodall, the two young men enlisted another
friend, Michael Wezyk, to do the deed.
Cardella was a convicted felon and couldn’t legally handle firearms, while Wezyk owned
a rifle.
The three men staked out a spot in South Milwaukee and debated how the deed should be done.
Cardella thought three shots in the back would do the trick.
Being the wiser of the bunch, a relative title here, Wezyk settled on one shot to the arm
and called it a day.
Cardella was whisked to the local hospital expecting his girlfriend to visit him and
pour on the love.
The girlfriend didn’t, but the cops did.
His story about a “gunfight” fell apart quickly and Wezyk soon found himself in front
of a criminal court.
During the hearing, where Wezyk pleaded guilty, Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney
Christopher Rawsthorne spoke for everyone when he stated that “this has to be the
most phenomenally stupid case that I have seen.”
Wezyk got 100 hours of probation which, all things considered, was a far better outcome
than Cardella’s, who goes down as the mastermind of one of the most phenomenally stupidest
stunts ever.
9.
Boy Plots Own Murder
In another case where the victim was actually the perpetrator, a 14 year old boy from Britain
tricked another teen in an online chat forum into attempting to murder him.
The plot began when “John” befriended “Mark” through different online identities,
such as a British secret service member named “Janet.”
Janet promised Mark sex (which included persuading him to perform sex acts on a webcam), an introduction
to the prime minister, a gun, up to £500,000 in cash and a career in British intelligence.
In return Mark had to kill “John.”
Unaware that he was being asked to murder the very person who made the request, Mark’s
last exchange occurred on June 28, 2004: “U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre and kill
him in the middle of trafford centre??”
To which John/Janet replied: “Yes.”
The boys agreed to meet and Mark stabbed John repeatedly.
Seriously wounded in his kidney, liver and gall bladder, John was taken to the nearby
hospital in critical condition.
Luckily, the boy survived, but his and Mark’s story of an assault and robbery fell apart
when detectives examined CCTV footage showing Mark and John entering an alleyway where they
were alone for 25 minutes.
Detectives also discovered the chat room logs where the boys met and learned the full extent
of their deception.
Both boys were remanded into custody and tried as juveniles.
John was given a three year supervision order and was banned from Internet usage without
an accompanying adult, while Mark was given a two year supervision order.
John’s exact motive remains unclear, but it’s one of the most bizarre and tragic
suicide attempts on record.
8.
Deadly Aesthetician
Dawn DaLuise was a “skin-care guru” in Hollywood who boasted celebrity clients like
Jennifer Aniston and Nicki Minaj.
But DaLuise got into a bizarre feud with one Gabriel Suarez after he moved his own beauty
salon business into the same building.
Already convinced that Suarez was ruining her business, DaLuise went into paranoid mode
when Craigslist ads seeking a man to fulfill her rape fantasies began appearing in her
name.
Certain that Suarez was the culprit, DaLuise hired former Detroit Lions quarterback Chris
Geile to murder her competitor.
Now here’s where it gets weird.
It turned out that DaLuise’s cyberstalker was in fact her best friend, Edward Feinstein.
In an example of “with friends like this, who needs enemies,” Feinstein posted the
lewd ads to create a scenario where he could swoop in and rescue her.
Meanwhile, Geile denied DaLuise’s claims, stating he only met her once.
DaLuise pled not guilty at her arraignment and Feinstein was arrested on a separate charge
for cyberstalking.
All of which just goes to show that the saying you should keep your friends close but your
enemies closer is just plain wrong.
7.
Elderly Serial Killers
In October of 1989, Ray and Faye Copeland were arrested after a grifter named Jack McCormick
alerted the local police in Mooresville, Missouri that they had tried to kill him.
McCormick’s revelations unraveled one of the most shocking serial killer cases in American
history.
The Copelands were AARP members when they started their killing spree, making them the
oldest serial killers on record.
Local authorities had long known about Ray Copeland’s criminal activities in fraud
and horse theft, which he began in the 1940s.
After purchasing a four acre farm in Mooresville, Copeland turned to grifters to take care of
his scams by having them buy cattle at auctions with bad checks.
This seemed like a foolproof plan to avoid detection until the police caught one of the
men he worked with and got him to confess.
Ray did nearly two years in prison for fraud.
When he got out he returned to his life of crime, but this time he had an even more foolproof
plan to keep from getting caught: he started killing off the grifters.
The authorities got a warrant to search his premises and discovered the grisly evidence:
the bodies of three men in Copeland’s barn.
More victims were uncovered in a nearby well and beneath another barn.
All of them were shot in the head with a .22 caliber bolt-action rifle, the same weapon
that was uncovered in Copeland’s home.
Faye Copeland, who married Ray in the ’40s, was implicated as well when investigators
found a ledger in her handwriting with the names of each victim marked off with an X.
She’d also made a quilt out of their clothes, and we’re surprised that premise hasn’t
been used in a horror movie.
Though both Faye and later her children claimed that she was a victim of spousal abuse, she
was convicted along with her husband for first degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison.
Both she and Ray died of natural causes behind bars.
6.
The Gibbons Twins
Though Jennifer and June Gibbons were brought up in England in a close-knit family, the
twin sisters took close-knit to the extreme.
Isolating themselves from their parents and other siblings, the girls locked themselves
in their room, developed their own form of communication and documented their thoughts
in journals.
The girls were dangerously inseparable, and couldn’t do anything without the other.
Even their movements became synchronized.
Though close, they also hated each other.
June wrote in her journal, “I have fresh marks on my face to prove how distressing
life is becoming with my twin sister.
Have I the strength to kill her?”
After the two wrote novels and explored their sexuality with the local boys, they turned
to pretty crime by breaking into a school and stealing magazines, then torching a tractor
shed.
They were arrested for arson, diagnosed with severe personality disorders and sentenced
to Broadmoor, a psychiatric hospital.
There the girls became even more interdependent and often took it out on each other through
violence.
Many rightly feared the girls would murder each other.
Both sisters realized they could no more live with each other than they could without each
other, and soon made a pact: one of them had to die in order for the other to be free.
Upon their release from Broadmoor 11 years later, Jennifer slumped over beside her sister
on the bus and died.
The cause of her death was from an inflammation of the heart, although doctors couldn’t
pinpoint the initial cause — it was as if she had willed herself to die for her sister.
5.
A Satanic Cult Murder Mystery
In 1972, the decomposing corpse of a missing teenage girl was discovered in the small town
of Springfield, New Jersey when a dog brought home a human forearm.
That gruesome discovery set in motion a series of rumors and mysteries that involved a conspiracy
of Satanists and witches.
Jeanette DePalma had been missing for six weeks when she was finally identified.
Her body was allegedly set up in a ritualistic manner, with sticks formed into crosses that
were arranged around the body to resemble the shape of a coffin.
A rock altar was also supposedly created nearby.
Much of what is known about the case, however, involve the rumors of witchcraft and Satanism
that still swirl to this day.
Pushing these rumors was Reverend Tate, who stated in an interview that the teenager,
known to be a devout Christian, was the victim of a ritualistic sacrifice by Satanists.
The local police department, for whatever reason, chose not to contradict the rumors,
and so they strengthened over the years.
Some of the rumors even suggest that a witches’ coven or Satanist cult had taken over the
town.
Many residents are too scared out of their wits to even discuss the case, which remains
open to this day.
4.
The Murder of Lobster Boy
Grady Stiles, Jr. was a huge draw on the sideshow circuit.
Known as Lobster Boy, he had a condition called ectrodactyly, a congenital deformity that
causes the hands and feet to resemble claws and tails.
During his lifetime, Stiles, Jr. racked up a lot of bad karma.
The raging alcoholic was known to beat his two wives and their children.
In 1978, Stiles, Jr. shot and killed his daughter’s fiancé the night before their wedding because
he disapproved of him and got a sympathy plea with a 15 year probation due to his condition,
despite a confession and lack of remorse.
After divorcing his second wife, Stiles remarried his first wife, Mary Therese, who left him
years earlier after he ripped an intrauterine device out of her.
But Mary Therese regretted her decision when Stiles picked up where he left off and continued
to beat her, their children and her children from a previous marriage.
This time, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
According to authorities, Mary Therese and her stepson Harry paid Chris Wyant, a teenage
circus performer and neighbor of the Stiles’, $1500 in cash to put an end to their misery.
Wyant was convicted of the 1992 murder and given a 27 year sentence, Mary Therese was
given 12 years and Harry was sentenced to life in prison.
Years later, Grady Stiles III was circumspect about his father: “Thank you for showing
me who not to be and maybe you can appreciate who I became because of that.
You were a drunken bastard but you were my dad.”
3.
Slender Man
Slender Man, a tall creature with a blank face and abnormally long arms, has developed
an elaborate mythology.
Created by Eric Knudsen on the Something Awful Forums in 2009, the meme has been picked up
by Internet users who’ve created their own variations.
While Slender Man is a work of fiction for creatively minded adults, it was too real
for two girls.
On May 31, 2014, two 12 year-olds lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her after
being inspired by Slender Man stories they had read online.
Stabbed 19 times and with a major artery in her heart nearly severed, the victim crawled
out of the woods and onto the road where she was discovered by a bicyclist.
She survived, but her friends are now facing 60 years in prison.
Despite the fact that the perpetrators were diabolical in plotting the murder, they were
still little girls.
They had originally intended to slit the victim’s throat at a sleepover, but changed their minds
after they went rollerskating.
One of the girls also claimed that she had seen Slender Man in her dreams and that he
could read her mind and teleport.
Both girls expressed remorse, with one saying “The bad part of me wanted her to die, the
good part of me wanted her to live.”
In spite of this they’ll be prosecuted as adults, although one girl was initially found
to be incompetent to stand trial before her mental state improved.
2.
The Black Dahlia
When Elizabeth Short arrived in Hollywood she dreamed that one day she’d be famous,
but certainly not by being the victim of one of the most notorious murder mysteries in
American history.
On January 15, 1947, Short’s corpse was discovered by housewife Betty Bersinger in
a quiet residential neighborhood.
The body had been drained of blood and expertly bisected.
Detectives arrived to investigate the crime scene but found it already compromised by
a swarm of reporters and curious bystanders.
The horrific facts of the murder were clear — a grin had been carved into her mouth,
rope marks on her wrists and ankles indicated she had been tied up and probably tortured,
and the corpse had been carefully and elaborately posed.
In spite of evidence that Short was killed due to hemorrhaging caused by massive blows
to the head, no actual murder weapons were recovered.
A number of Short’s long list of lotharios were considered prime suspects, but investigators
were ultimately reduced to investigating the University of Southern California’s medical
students because of how expertly the murderer carved up the body.
As the years passed, Short’s death was sent to the cold case files, but the awful manner
of her mysterious death continues to mystify.
In 1996, James Ellroy published a book on the case, which was later adapted into a movie.
And people are still coming forward claiming to be or know her murderer.
Recently Steve Hodel, a former LAPD homicide detective, claimed that his father, George,
was the killer.
George, who was charged with incest and child molestation in 1949, was also a prime suspect
for the murder in 1947.
But to this day her murder remains unsolved, ironically giving Short the one thing she
wanted most in life.
1.
Father Danke, the Cannibal of Ziebiçe
Karl Denke, or Father Danke as he was known in the small Polish town of Ziebiçe, was
the nicest guy anyone met.
Born in 1870 to wealthy farmers, Danke lived an unremarkable life.
He attended church, helped the poor, offered travelers his home, abstained from alcohol
and sex, and sold suspenders, belts, shoelaces and pork to local dealers for a living.
So when a drifter showed up at the police station covered in blood on December 21, 1924,
claiming that Denke had tried to kill him, nobody wanted to believe it.
The accuser, Vincenz Olivier, refused to back off his accusations and the reluctant police
had no choice but to arrest Danke.
By morning he was found hanging in his cell from his handkerchief.
The police searched Danke’s home and made a gruesome discovery.
Bloody clothes hung in his closet and documents containing the names of people who had been
recently released from prisons and hospitals were stacked near the window.
But the most shocking discovery were the jars of pickled human meat, human bones, leather
straps made from human skin and shoelaces from human hair.
Danke had turned his apartment into a veritable factory for processing humans for food and
clothes.
He had murdered and processed at least 40 people, and had even sold human flesh to butchers
by claiming it was pork.
Needless to say, pork sales in town plummeted.