#1
It's rare to catch footage of a serial killer in action, they're usually the methodical type. But that's exactly what happened in this first mystery, which was solved, thanks to a CCTV camera. Between 2009 and 2010, a serial killer plagued the streets of Bradford, England. During his year-long spree, he took the lives of three women. His weapon of choice? A crossbow. But for this depraved individual, killing his victims wasn't quite enough. He had to consume parts of them as well, leading to the media dubbing him "The Crossbow Cannibal.
" He was first brought to the police's attention when two prostitutes in the local area disappeared They were suspected to have been murdered. Initially, the authorities were left stumped. There was an eccentric man around town called Stephen Griffiths. He was known to frequent the prostitutes. What was so eccentric about him? He used to take his pet lizard for walks around town on a leash, wearing a long leather coat and sunglasses, regardless of the weather. Well sure, he was very different, but nobody thought he was dangerous. By all accounts, he seemed polite and friendly. Everyone who knew him was completely oblivious to the twisted hobby he had taken up. Oblivious, that is, until the Crossbow Cannibal made one fatal mistake, which was captured by the camera in his apartment corridor. A stupid mistake really, but one we can all be thankful he made, especially after looking at the images that were captured on the night of his final kill. Here we see Griffiths, the Crossbow Cannibal, outside his block of flats, with a woman called Suzanne Blamires. The two of them are chatting casually.
To any onlookers, nothing would have seemed out of the ordinary. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary to Suzanne, either. The pair enter the building and continued to talk in the elevator. Griffiths appears tense in the footage, but tries to play things cool. Suzanne still doesn't sense that anything's wrong. They reach his floor, and Suzanne follows him into his apartment, a decision that's about to cost her her life.
A mere two and a half minutes after entering, Suzanne frantically bursts back through the door, running for her life. Griffiths is in hot pursuit. You can just about make out the crossbow in his hands. He grabs her. If you've ever wondered what the face of a man ready to kill looks like, that's it. Seconds later, he shoots Susan in the head with a crossbow bolt. The Crossbow Cannibal's third victim is dead The thrill of the hunt passes, and Griffiths retires to his flat, dragging his victim's lifeless body inside with him. 20 minutes later he returns to the hallway, brandishing his beloved weapon. He taunts his audience, sticking his middle finger up at the camera. Arrogant. Remorseless. Psychopathic. He no longer appears to care whether he's captured or not. In the past, Griffiths had been able to kill his victims before they even had a chance to flee. Suzanne might not have been able to save her own life, but by forcing Griffiths to kill her on camera, she ensured that his rampage was now over.
The block managers themselves suspected that Griffiths was up to no good, and that's why they had the cameras installed in the first place— to keep an eye on him. Well, their action solved the case, and once they checked the footage, they were able to inform the police immediately. Griffiths was in cuffs within the hour. Suzanne's body was found dumped in a nearby lake, along with his second victim's, whose body had been chopped into 81 pieces. Yeah. 81. Her head was fished out. The features had been removed. His first victim's corpse has still never been found to this day, in pieces or otherwise. At his trial, Griffiths introduced himself as the Crossbow Cannibal, and confessed that he had indeed murdered the three women. He then described how he dismembered them in his bathtub, and cooked and ate parts of their bodies. Finally, he told the court how he took the remaining chunks he didn't want to eat, and bagged them up, and chucked them into the lake.
It was also revealed that he had been harassing his ex-girlfriend over the phone, threatening her and laughing maniacally. [Muffled voice recording] "I'm not gonna go away, so... I guess [???] was better..." [Maniacal laughter] As it stands, Griffiths has only been conclusively connected with three murders. But he's suspected of killing at least five others as well The only person he's tried to kill since being arrested is himself. He's had little success with that, having failed multiple times. He will remain in prison for the rest of his life, and the streets are safer for it. The part I find most chilling about these images is how he just goes from normal and friendly, to psychopathic. He becomes a rage-filled murderer within an instant. Seeing him talk casually to this woman, knowing full well that he plans on killing her within moments... It's truly disturbing. I've left a link to a new story about the case down in the description. It shows parts of the footage and discusses the case a little more. Feel free to check it out.
#2
Well, it wouldn't be a Lazy Masquerade mystery video if we didn't have at least a few more creepy doe reconstructions, those artist depictions of unidentified bodies. Oh, I just love digging deep into the uncanny valley. A lot of people wonder why the reconstruction artists make their subjects look so... Inhuman. I mean, surely they'd want to make them look as close as how they looked in reality as possible, right? Well, actually, the opposite is true. By making the images too realistic, they run the risk of making the victim look like any other generic person. If the picture they create could literally be anyone, then it wouldn't stay fresh in people's minds, or might not catch the attention of someone who actually knew the victim. Instead, the police intentionally accentuate certain distinguishing features about the dead person. For example, this woman. From her body, the police could tell that she had a very crooked neck. Sure, it's very creepy, but it stays in your head, and makes you think if you know anyone who had a crooked neck. In this way, the images are more likely to ring a few bells. When the police released this image of a Jane Doe in 2012, you might have thought it was unlikely anyone would have recognized the woman. It's barely recognizable as human to begin with. Looks more like something you'd see in a particularly creepy episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog.
At the time, she was known only as "Suitcase Body." Police had found the half decomposed corpse of a young woman stuffed into a suitcase along a Wisconsin highway. Judging from how decomposed she was, she must have been dead for at least a year. They had absolutely no leads, nor any idea of who she was. And what they did know was that she had a very chipmunk-like face. So, that's what they asked their artist to highlight in this reconstruction. Their hope was that it might help solve the mystery of who she was, and, in turn, reveal who left her in the suitcase. Amazingly, this creepy image served its purpose. The Jane Doe known only as Suitcase Body was actually 19-year-old Jenny Gamez from Cottage Grove, Oregon. You might not see the likeness. I know I couldn't, but the reconstruction was enough to draw the attention of Jenny's foster mother, Lorraine. She hadn't heard from Jenny in a good long while. Jenny had moved away, but it still seemed strange that she had cut off all contact. Police checked Jenny's dental records, which confirmed that the body in the suitcase was indeed hers. Over a year after her murder, Suitcase Body had finally reclaimed her identity. Sadly, Jenny wasn't her killer's only victim. On the same stretch of highway, another suitcase was found.
This one containing another woman's body. This victim's identity wasn't so hard to trace. She was Laura Simonson, a 37-year-old from Farmington, Minnesota. So who was responsible for all of this? Well, it took them a while to crack the case, but eventually the police were led to the home of the killer. Steven Zelich, an ex-cop. While an officer in West Dallas, he abused his powers by stalking women in the area and gaining access to their personal information. He resigned in 2001 to avoid disciplinary action. That way, he could still go on to become a private security officer. He met both Jenny and Laura in online BDSM chat rooms, under the username Mr. Handcuffs. On separate occasions, he convinced both of them to meet him in his hotel room. Then, they engaged in what Zelich called breathplay, a dangerous sex game involving strangulation. The girls were bound and gagged with a rope tied around their necks. He then pulled on the rope to asphyxiate them, something that gave him a sense of erotic satisfaction. Both women died so that this guy could get off. He then kept their bodies hidden in his refrigerator for months, and then eventually dumped them. In court, he claimed that both of their deaths had been accidental. Right. Because if you accidentally killed someone in this way, you would dump their body off in a suitcase and do it all over again. The jurors saw through this poor attempt at avoiding responsibility. He was found guilty of their murders, and will remain in prison until the day he dies.
#3
Another case of an online predator now. This was actually an urban legend that circulated around the Kansas City area. Amazingly, he had turned out to be completely true. It was the mid-90s, when the internet was still relatively new. Lot of people had heard about a guy named "Slavemaster." He had apparently been hanging around in online chat rooms, seducing women and luring them to their deaths. Little did everyone realize, that the Slavemaster rumors were more than just hogwash. Over the course of the decade, numerous women who browsed social networking sites in the area had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The one thing that linked them all together was that they'd all been in contact with Slavemaster prior to vanishing.
His first online victim, Sheila Faith, believed that Slavemaster was a wealthy businessman and philanthropist. Apparently, he had offered to pay for her daughter's spina bifida medical expenses. The mother and daughter moved out to Kansas City to take him up on his offer. Shortly after arriving, the pair of them disappeared. For the next seven years, the elusive Slavemaster cashed in Sheila's pension checks. Then came the turn of the Polish immigrant Izabela Lewicka. Slavemaster convinced the 21-year-old that he was going to marry her.
Instead, he got her to sign a 115-item slave contract, giving him complete control over most aspects of her life, including her bank accounts. Not long after signing this agreement, Izabela also vanished into thin air. Slavemaster told his real-life friends that she'd been caught smoking marijuana, and had consequently been deported. Finally, he met a woman called Suzette Trouten on a BDSM site. She had agreed to travel the world with Slavemaster as his submissive slave. What makes people want to do things like this, I have no idea. But whatever the reason, Suzette suffered the same fate as her predecessors. Slavemaster then sent letters to her mother, pretending to be Suzette, saying how well the trip was going. So, what had Slavemaster been doing with all of these women? Well, unfortunately for him, the world was soon going to find out. He had become cocky and complacent, and failed to effectively cover his tracks. He was developing quite the reputation online, and his online alias was being linked to more and more suspicious activity.
Eventually, it led police right to Slavemaster's front door. Still, they needed a warrant to search the place. It just so turns out that a woman suspected the occupant of stealing some of her sex toys. Perfect. That gave the police the excuse they needed. The house belonged to a man called John Edward Robinson. In his house, they found the decaying bodies of Izabela and Suzette, stuffed into 85-pound chemical drums. They had died from blunt force trauma to the back of the head. In acid-filled drums in a nearby storage facility, they found the bodies of Sheila, Sheila's daughter, Debbie, and another woman identified as Beverly Bonner. You see, before discovering the internet, Robinson had already started his killing spree. In the case of Beverly, he had convinced her to leave her husband and come and work for him in Kansas. Once Robinson had arranged for her alimony checks to be sent to his address, Beverly's family never heard from her again It was all to do with money. Perhaps the most chilling thing he did, however, was gain the trust of a young mother called Lisa Stasi, who he had met at a battered woman's refuge. You can imagine, Lisa met the same fate as Robinson's other victims. However, Robinson knew that his brother and sister-in-law were having trouble trying to adopt a baby. He told them that he knew a child whose mother had just committed suicide. He sent them some forged adoption papers, charged them $5,500, and handed them the 4-month-old baby of the woman he had just killed no more than three days earlier Lisa's body was never discovered. Robinson is believed to be linked to the disappearance of even more women, though none of their bodies have ever been found either, Perhaps he dissolved them in the chemical drums. Regardless, Slavemaster was found guilty of his crimes, and remains on death row to this day. He is regarded as the internet's first serial killer.
#4
It's everyone's worst nightmare: You come home by yourself from a long day at work and enter your dark, empty house. Only, it's not as empty as you were expecting. On the night of September 6th, 2006, Susan Kuhnhausen got back from her long shift at the hospital, walked through her front door, and into her bedroom. Strange, she thought. The room isn't usually this dark. Wait., did I forget to open the curtains this morning? From behind the door, a man appeared. A man she had never seen or spoken to before. His name's Edward Dalton Haffey, and he's holding a black claw hammer. What this guy didn't realize was that Susan Kuhnhausen was a badass. Fight or flight immediately kicks in. She had seen and dealt with a lot of shit as a nurse, so her instinct wasn't to run. On top of that, she had been trained in self-defense, and knew that crowding the guy would lessen the impact of his hammer swings. So, she gets close.
Wham! The hammer strikes her in the left temple, but the would-be killer can't generate enough force to take her down. She's dazed and bloody, but getting closer had worked. Susan knows that she's fighting for her life at this point. Anyone that aims for the head with a hammer is aiming to kill. She tries to reason with him, but Haffey won't listen. He's hell-bent on taking her out. Now she tries to use her superior weight to knock him down, but he manages to push her away. "You're strong," he says. The only words he uttered the whole encounter. It's then that Susan managed to wrestle the hammer out of her assailant's hands. She takes it, and slams it into his head several times in quick succession. Haffey goes down, but he manages to grab the hammer back. And that's when Susan grabbed him by the throat and began strangling him. His face turns purple Terrified, she makes for the exit. But Haffey isn't dead. Susan doesn't know it, but he's got a near lethal amount of cocaine in his system. Nothing's gonna slow him down. He grabs her as she tries to escape and punches her in the face twice, knocking her to the ground. As he stood over her, brandishing his claw hammer, Susan knew that she was as good as dead. But the fighter inside her triumphed. Susan chose a life over death. She somehow manages to get him on the ground with her, and puts him in a chokehold. She screams at him, demanding to know why he was trying to kill her. "Tell me," she says. "Tell me, and I'll call you an ambulance." Eventually, his face turns purple again. This time, permanently. She had strangled Haffey to death. An ambulance was called and statements were taken. It was obvious that Susan had acted in self-defense.
The question remained, however: Why had Haffey decided to kill Susan that evening? As it turns out, the question that the police should have been focusing on was: Who had sent him? You see, Haffey was a hitman. He was paid $50,000 to sneak into Susan's house and beat her to death. When the police searched the crime scene, they didn't find anything that might reveal the identity of whoever hired Haffey. It wasn't until one of Susan's friends came over to her place, and noticed an out of place backpack in her basement that the crime was finally solved. Inside the backpack was a container of Hershey syrup, $200 in cash diabetes pills, and a notebook containing a cell number. Next to it, Haffey had written: Call Mike. Mike. That was Susan's husband. Her estranged husband, to be precise. The pair had been separated for a while at this point, and since their breakup, Mike hadn't been doing so well for himself.
He had lost his job at the local adult video store and had no place to live. But he and Susan were still technically married. If she were to suddenly catch a bad case of having her brains bashed in, he'd inherit the house. So, he made a deal with Haffey, a former coworker at the porno shack. Kill his so-called "bitch of a wife." Sell the house, and earn a sixth of the place's value. 50 large. Mike still had a spare key to Susan's and knew all of the alarm codes. If all went well, there'd be nothing to link him to the crime. It was perfect. What he didn't plan on, though, was his Vietnam vet hitman being killed by his former partner. Down at the station, he came up with a half-assed alibi, but the police weren't buying it. He got seven years in jail, but died of cancer on Friday the 13th of June 2014, only 92 days before he was due to be released. If this incident teaches us anything, it's that love can be a dangerous game. Especially when you fall out of it, and there's money on the line. Thankfully, Susan survived her ordeal. "If you can't run and you can't hide, you have to fight," she said. "You don't know that you won't survive." Hey guys, Lazy here, and thank you very much for listening
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