Kreischer Mansion, Staten Island, N. Y.: Crime Family Bonanno Killing Place
Staten Island’s Kreischer Mansion looks just like the sort of place that would star in neighborhood kids’ ghost stories: a big Victorian house surrounded by iron gates and topped with an ominous turret. It even had someone who could fill the role of the mean caretaker who might chase away curious children or enterprising amateur sleuths; indeed, this tale has a twist worthy of Scooby-Do, in which the apparently supernatural events pale beside a real criminal act.
Ghastly rumors have long haunted this Arthur Kill Road hilltop manse. Area residents claim to have heard noises they attribute to long-gone children lamenting their punishments, or to a cook who they say committed suicide. Others say they’ve glimpsed a spectral couple wandering the grounds. That pair is thought by some to be the ghosts of Edward Kreischer and his grieving wife. His father, a German brickmaker, built this mansion and another like it for Edward and his brother in 1885 (the other building burned to the ground during the Great Depression). The elder Kreischer died just a year after building these houses. A few years later, the brick factory his sons inherited burned down. The family rebuilt it, but their business never regained its initial success. Distraught over the flagging family fortunes and quarrels with employees, in 1894 Edward Kreischer shot himself in the head and died.
Had anyone more closely investigated those Victorian ghosts in the mansion, they would have found themselves in the middle of a very different current-day case. Joseph “Joe Black” Young was no ordinary caretaker. Thanks to testimony from a Mafia snitch, the 29-year old ex-marine was found guilty in a fall 2008 federal trial of murdering Robert McKelvey at the mansion in 2005: stabbing him, drowning him in an ornate pool, then chopping the corpse into pieces and disposing of it in the house’s basement furnace. Young and his turn-coat accomplice, Stefan Cicale, acted on the orders of Bonanno crew member Michael “Sonny” Maggio and on a $10,000 contract from mob boss Gino Galestro.
Cicale, Maggio and Galestro cooperated with the Feds; Galestro has pleaded guilty to ordering the hit and says that McKelvey owed him money. In testimony Young admitted dismembering and incinerating McKelvey, but he blames the killing on Maggio, saying that he fought with McKelvey but that it was Maggio who slit the victim’s throat. Tapes submitted as evidence in which Young complains about not being paid and threatens the mobsters, convinced a jury that he took responsibility for the crime.
The Kreischer Mansion’s latest ghost met his fate at the hands of an likely aspirant for inclusion in a modern ghost story: on his MySpace page, Young lists his occupation as “Death”.
Basis for the 2008 film The Strangers
On the morning of April 12, 1981, 14-year old Sheila Sharp left a next-door sleepover and returned to Cabin 28 at the popular Keddie Resort, where her family had been living for the past two months. What she found there would cast a permanent shadow over this bucolic vacation spot in the northern Sierra Nevadas of California. The walls and furniture had been destroyed and were covered with blood. Amid the chaos were the bound, mutilated and nearly unrecognizable bodies of her mother Glenna Susan “Sue” Sharp, 36, her brother John, 16, and his friend Dana Wingate, 17. Her sister Tina, 13 was missing; three younger children, her two other brothers and their friend, were unharmed in another room.
John Sharp and Dana Wingate had hitchhiked to Keddie from Quincy, Calif., the night before, possibly after a party. Either awaiting them, accompanying them, or soon to follow them were the killers, who used duct tape and electrical wire to truss Sue, John and Dana Wingate, as well as Tina Sharp. Then, over the course of ten hours, the killers brutally attacked the group—and their surroundings—with steak knives and a claw hammer. The next cabin was a mere 15 feet away, but neighbors and passersby didn’t hear a thing.
Tina Sharp wasn’t there when police arrived, but subsequent investigation showed that she had been there part of the night. The friend who’d been in the other room was able to convince police that Tina had indeed been there, and helped them determine that there had been two assailants and put together sketches of the pair. The killers were never caught. Some think the neighbors who’d invited Susan Sharp to a bar that night (she declined) were involved—the list of accusers at one time included one of the men’s own wife. Other locals whisper about Satanic worship; yet others suggest there was a drug connection, either through the two young men or in a case of mistaken identity.
In a gruesome coda, Tina’s head was found three years later near a waterfall fifty miles down the hill. The case has never been solved.
The once-welcoming Keddie Cabins would subsequently fall into disrepair. Longtime owner, Gary Mollath, tried to sell the place and renovated it, but the tragedy made the once-beautiful place unattractive. After a period of decay and infestation by squatters, he again rented some of the cabins, but Cabin 28 remained empty, becoming the object of rumors of hauntings. Locals say they’ve heard moans and the sound of slamming doors from the abandoned building and seen shadowy figures. Mollath’s stepdaughter recounts once seeing the word “no” scrawled on the house’s door, with a pitchfork propped beside it—the next day, both the writing and the tool were gone. In 2004, Mollath razed Cabin 28.
Annette Martin, a psychic in nearby Campbell, warns that victims of violent, unsolved crimes may stick around because their traumatized spirits don’t understand that they’re dead. She maintains that this mysterious “no” was the victims’ continuing cry against their assailants—and that simply razing a building won’t quiet its ghosts.
Falling behind at work and trying to cover it up isn’t unusual. We’ve heard of post office clerks stashing piles of letters when they can’t get them delivered. But if your business is disposing of bodies, the evidence is pretty hard to cover up. A propane deliveryman twice complained to the sheriff about seeing bodies on the Tri-State Crematory grounds when he stopped to relieve himself in the bushes. The sheriff’s office was initially unconcerned: of course a crematory is going to have bodies prior to incineration. After a few anonymous tips to the local office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), though, including one from a woman who found a human skull while walking her dog, the sheriff went out to see it for himself, and encountered a truly grisly scene.
Investigators first found 20 bodies in the building where the crematory supplies were kept. Then they found bodies everywhere: in cars, in vaults, beneath dirt mounds, in a coffin putrefying beside a lake, across the lot’s sprawling property, in a mass grave right by the house.
Ray Marsh opened the business in the early 70s; his son, Ray Brent Marsh, dropped out of college to take over when his father became ill in 1996. Ray Brent’s parents stayed on in the house on the business’ large plot in northern Georgia, and he seemed to capably manage the business. Until, that is, the authorities found 334 corpses in his yard. 125 of them were never identified. Their relatives have urns filled with cement dust rather than the remains of their dearly departed relatives.
Financial reasons don’t seem to have led Ray Brent Marsh to let the bodies pile up, as it costs only around $25 to cremate a body, and under $800 every few years for service to keep the oven in working order. And investigators ruled out necrophiliac intentions. Why, then, did this appalling disregard for the dead happen? One attorney’s explanation: mercury in the corpses’ dental fillings, released into the air, slowly poisoned the crematory family over the years, killing the elder Marsh and confusing the younger Marsh so much that he didn’t do the easy, sensible, lucrative and decent thing in incinerating the bodies, but hid them in the yard.
The younger Marsh was charged with counts that included fraud, abuse of a corpse, theft, and false statements. Under a plea agreement, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Many of his victims’ relatives don’t think this was enough. Hopefully the 334 people whose bodies he let decay are now resting peacefully and not seeking revenge.
Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Expedition World’s Fair presented the world with a number of modern marvels: electricity, the Ferris wheel, Eadweard Muybridge’s moving pictures, ragtime, the hamburger…and the nation’s first high-profile serial killer, hotelier H. H. Holmes.
In 1889, Holmes (born Herman W. Mudgett) arrived in what is now Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood and began working for Dr. and Mrs. Holden as a pharmacist. He seemed to be the perfect assistant and neighbor: able and industrious. His new acquaintances could not have imagined that this charming and dapper fellow had fled a succession of divorces and frauds—or that as a medical student he took out insurance on corpses, staged “accidents” with the bodies and collected payments upon the cleverly staged deaths.
When Mrs. Holden disappeared shortly after Dr. Holden’s death of cancer, Holmes told the community that she had headed west and that he’d bought the drug store. The business continued to do well, and Holmes soon bought the lot across the street at 63rd and Wallace and announced that he would build a hotel for the upcoming fair. Holmes built a hefty, three-story building with 60 rooms. There were hidden passages and secret stairways, trap doors, chutes plunging to the basement, a staircase that opened to the alley below. More ominously, there were asphyxiation champers, a dissecting table and a crematory. Holmes’s “guests” would check in but not check out: he tortured and killed at least 27 but possibly hundreds of innocents.
He lured them to their deaths not only by advertising lodging to the fair’s tourists, but by offering jobs to small town and country girls who he warned must practice absolute secrecy and tell no one their employment plans, lest his competitors steal his clients. He imprisoned these lone strangers, tortured them, and killed them. His wife disappeared—he later confessed to killing her in a botched abortion attempt—but he already had a new consort, Minnie Williams, who became an accomplice in his villainous deeds. They committed a series of murders. One man they killed on a stretching rack Holmes had designed; Williams bludgeoned her own sister to death. Bizarrely, Williams acted as the witness when Holmes married another woman. The threesome lived and traveled together for a time, but Minnie—of course—disappeared. Holmes claimed she ran off to Europe; it seems more likely that Williams became another victim in Holmes’s murder castle.
In 1894 Holmes killed his longtime partner Ben Pietzel rather than pay him his share of their latest take, and he added Pietzel’s wife and three children to his entourage; he sent the woman east and told her he’d bring her children out later. He was arrested and briefly jailed for cheating in a horse trade. Then, he faked his own death and tried to collect the insurance money as someone else. When his insurance company balked, he just tried again. That scam worked—until an accomplice ratted on him. A Pinkerton agent pursued Holmes to Boston, and arrested him for another horse swindle. Meanwhile, the Pinkertons were starting to wonder where the Pietzel children were—and, following the trail through which Holmes forwarded his mail, they eventually found two of the children’s corpses in Toronto. Finally, detectives got a warrant to search the Chicago Murder Castle.
The horrors they found there defy the imagination: a dissecting table, bottles of poisons, containers of quicklime and acid big enough to eat away a body, a gas chamber, coffins holding female corpses, an incinerator littered with charred human remains: the skeletons of small children.
Shortly thereafter—whether by arson as part of a cover-up or by disgusted neighbors, or an accident—the house burned to the ground. Neighbors avoided the block, claiming that the victims’ ghosts haunted the building, their moans and cries lingering on. After Holmes was hanged for his crimes in 1895 following a swift trial, a number of the people involved with his trial died under bizarre circumstances, including a priest who had visited him before his execution, the doctor who certified him dead, the jury foreman, and others. This embroidered the legend: that Holmes was continuing his despicable behavior from beyond the grave, still killing for revenge and the joy of killing. In 1938 a US Post Office was erected at the site, but the rumors did not fade. Reports of poltergeists and apparitions continue to this day, and some claim that Holmes’s ghost also visits the nearby Museum of Science and Industry, one of the few remaining structures from the 1893 Exposition.
Two of California’s most notorious serial killers might have continued their gruesome work undiscovered had one of them not been caught shoplifting at a Bay Area lumberyard in 1985. When the vise Leonard Lake and Charles Ng had been using in their victims’ torture broke, they needed a new one. A clerk spotted Ng hiding the vise under his coat and called the police. Ng fled the scene, but Lake was arrested when police saw that he had a gun in his car, was using false license plates and had identification that seemed to belong to someone else. Lake gave up his partner’s name and his own, announced that he was running from the FBI—then swallowed two cyanide capsules and passed out, dying a short time later. Eventually, Ng would be caught in Canada—when he tried to shoplift a can of soda—extradited, tried, and, in 1999, sentenced to death. Meanwhile, Lake’s suspicious reaction to the incident, and the bloodstains police noticed in his trunk, led investigators to comb the rural ranch the men shared and piece together their macabre story.
Once police got started, it proved to be a straightforward, if horrifying, case to unravel. Documents in the car belonged to a number of other people—most of them missing persons, but one of them Lake’s ex-wife, who led them to the cabin they had shared in Calaveras County’s Sierra Nevada foothills. There could be no doubt that this house had been the site of something diabolical: the home was riddled with bullet holes and surfaces of the bedroom and living room were stained with blood. Outside there was a large incinerator, an ominous trench, a bare area that showed traces of lye, and a locked bunker that proved to be a torture chamber. Police would find more items connected to missing persons, as well as 12 bodies, along with 45 pounds of human bones; at least 25 victims met a horrific fate at this pair’s hands.
Former Renaissance Faire worker Lake and Hong Kong-born Ng, both ex-Marines, met in 1981 and soon embarked on an exercise in evil centered inside the cabin. In 1982, the men were charged with stealing weapons from a military base, but this was the least of their crimes. Lake’s diary, a collection of videotapes and other evidence revealed the details. A survivalist, he wanted to set up a series of bunkers where he and Ng and a group of sex slaves could repopulate the world in the event of nuclear war. His greatest fantasy, he said on videotape, was to kidnap and enslave a woman. And that they did: other tapes show soon-to-be victims performing strip teases, showering, and caressing the two men. Ng and Lake tortured, raped and killed these women. They also murdered several men either connected to the woman or whom the duo robbed, Lake’s brother and an earlier partner-in-crime, and at least two children.
As one might expect, residents and horror tourists report supernatural scares at the site of this sadistic carnage.
When a parking meter attendant told police he saw a naked man wearing a dog collar jump from a second story window, it was clear that something strange was going on at 4315 Charlotte Street. Chris Bryson’s eyes were swollen and his face and arms were scarred. It was Easter weekend, 1988, in Kansas City, Mo., when Bryson told police his strange tale.
He had met Robert Berdella on March 29 and went home with him. Once there, Berdella hit Bryson over the head, and injected him with something. When Bryson came to, he found himself tied up. Berdella not only sexually assaulted the drugged and bound young man, he committed torturous experiments on him, rubbing a painful liquid in his eyes, jolting his genitals with electric currents, and injecting his throat with drain cleaner. Berdella photographed the whole ordeal—and showed Bryson the photos of other young men he’d tortured, warning him that those who did not obey died.
The police’s initial search of the house supported Bryson’s story—and unearthed surprising and gruesome discoveries. In Berdella’s bedroom they found two human skulls, envelopes containing human teeth and a bag of human vertebrae, along with extensive notes on the crimes and a collection of videotapes and photographs showing other abused young men, including one who appeared to be dead. They found several articles about local missing persons, too, as well as the driver’s license of a missing man. There were also some unusual masks, and many books on occult practices. Outside, the searchers unearthed a body.
A second search warrant permitted investigators to search Berdella’s place of business, a novelty shop in a flea market across town, Bob’s Bazaar Bizarre. Records showed that Berdella had a short list of drug-related arrests and that he had actually been the subject of another investigation in 1985, due to his connections to two missing men, Jerry Howell, 19, and James Ferris, 25.
That there were 20 different men in Berdella’s perverse Polaroids but only a single body found initially perplexed police. Still, they identified the remains they had found, and Berdella quickly pleaded guilty to the murder of Larry Pearson. Then, he agreed to make a full confession if he were spared the death penalty and if his house not seized.
The death of Jerry Howell, his first victim, was accidental, Berdella told investigators. He dismembered the body, and left it on the curb for trash pick-up. Next, he subdued Robert Sheldon; when he was afraid another visitor might discover him, Berdella killed Sheldon. Walter Ferris, Todd Stoops, and Larry Pearson followed in grisly succession.
Berdella spent the rest of his life in prison and died there of a heart attack in 1992.
Cora Amurao survived a night of hell at 2319 East 100th Street, a dormitory for women student nurses at South Chicago Community Hospital. Her eight roommates were stabbed to death on July 13, 1966, but she managed to hide, and the next day fled a scene of such great carnage that it made veteran cops and police reporters vomit.
Detectives would find Gloria Davy dead on the sofa, naked and sexually assaulted. Upstairs, Pamela Wilkening had been gagged and stabbed through the heart. Suzanne Farris was in a pool of blood, having been strangled with her own stockings and stabbed 18 times. Mary Ann Jordan was stabbed three times. Nina Schmale was stabbed in a pattern around her broken neck. Valentina Paison’s throat had been cut. Merlita Gargullo had been stabbed and strangled. Patricia Matusek was also strangled. The women had been so disfigured that the director of nurses was able to recognize only 3 of them.
Merlita Garguilo; bottom row from left: Mary Ann Jordan, Nina Schmale, Pamela
Wilkening, Suzanne Farris
The description Amurao provided helped lead police to the Merchant Marine Union Hall at 2315 East 100th Street and to seaman Richard Speck. Born in Kirkwood, Ill., Speck had been raised in East Dallas, Texas, by his widowed mother and an alcoholic and violent stepfather, and he grew to have a drinking problem of his own. He married, but his wife filed for divorce a few months before his heinous night of crime; he had raped her at knifepoint. He would tell people that he had killed her ex-husband.
Speck had been questioned in connection with a rape and a rape-murder case earlier in 1966, but neither case developed to an arrest. It was the dormitory murders for which Speck would be punished, largely thanks to Amurao’s positive identification of him and her testimony. He claimed that due to the quantity of alcohol and drugs he’d ingested that night meant he had no memory of the evening. According to Amurao, Speck, armed, had forced entry into the dormitory and tied up the women. She hid under a bed, forced to listen as he raped, beat, and killed each of her friends.
His was an easy conviction, and Speck died in prison when suffered a heart attack in 1991. But that’s not the end of the story: in 1996, a local news anchor received a videotape showing a bizarre interview with Speck in prison. He’d had sex-change hormone treatments and was growing breasts; throughout the video, in which he confessed the crimes, he snorted cocaine with a $100 bill.
Glensheen Mansion is one of the jewels of Duluth’s tourism industry. Built by Minnesotan captain of industry Chester Congdon in 1905, the Jacobean house, situated on a sprawling, beautifully landscaped property overlooking frigid Lake Superior, is a gorgeous testament to the town’s golden age and the wealth the local iron mines once generated. What University of Minnesota-Duluth’s tours of the manse often overlook is its darker past.
Congdon died in 1916, the richest man in Minnesota. His daughter, Elisabeth Mannering Congdon, inherited Glensheen. She never married, but adopted a daughter, Marjorie Mannering Congdon, in 1934. The lonely woman’s compassionate attempt to share her rich life and love would be her downfall. Marjorie was a deeply troubled girl, and she did not grow out of her problems when she reached adulthood. In late June, 1977, the elderly and partly paralyzed Elisabeth was murdered, smothered with her satin pillow as she slept; her nurse, Velma Pietila, had tried to defend her and the assailants bludgeoned her to death with a candle stick. Marjorie’s second husband, Roger Caldwell, was found guilty of the crime. Marjorie was charged with aiding, abetting and conspiracy to commit murder, but she was acquitted on all counts. Prosecutors argued the couple was simply impatient to receive their inheritance.
Caldwell’s sentence was overturned by the state Supreme Court, but he later confessed to the murders—and committed suicide. Prosecutor John DeSanto has never been able to figure out why Caldwell seems to have mailed himself a coin from Glensheen on the day of the murders, and he still thinks there may have been a third person involved.
Marjorie’s life of crime didn’t stop there, though. She married another man, Wally Hagen, while still married to Caldwell; North Dakota filed a bigamy charge against her but never tried her. In 1984, she was convicted of arson in Mound, Minn. When she and Hagen moved to Ajo, Ariz., a rash of fires spread through their neighborhood. She was sentenced to 11 years for arson there. Marjorie convinced the judge to grant her a 24-hour furlough before starting the sentence, so that she could visit the ailing Hagen; he died under suspicious circumstances that very day. She was charged with his murder, but the case was dropped when investigators, unable to discount the possibility that the couple may have been planning a double suicide, decided to put off bringing the case to trial. In 2005, she was accused of theft, computer tampering, and forgery for allegedly trying to bilk other Tucson senior citizens out of the savings.
California’s Gold Rush made more than a few fortunes—and it inspired a great deal of greed and criminal activity. No story is more illustrative of the period’s dark side than that of the Mission San Miguel. Founded in 1797, just north of San Luis Obispo, the mission was among those secularized and sold by Mexico in 1843, just before the U. S. gained California in the Mexican-American war.
John William Reed turned the mission into a bed and breakfast and accepted payment only in gold, in plentiful supply in those years. He quickly amassed a fortune, which he hid somewhere on the property. Unfortunately, rumor of this treasure was too great a temptation for some goldbug-bitten adventurers to resist. A group of outlaws led by army deserter Joseph Peter Lynch had already killed one man for his gold and sold it to Reed on December 4, 1848. Boarding at the mission for the night, they heard their host brag about his lucrative business and the gold he’d managed to stockpile. They left the next day, but couldn’t resist the fever of the gold. Lynch and his men turned around and went back to the mission.
They rested in the mission’s kitchen, warming themselves at the fire. One man offered to fetch wood. When he came back in, he pulled an ax from his armload of firewood and attacked Reed; another of the gang stabbed Reed. They then killed Reed’s pregnant wife and their young child, their employees and the other guests They ransacked the house and stole anything of value, even Reed’s blue peacoat, but they never found his gold.
A mail carrier discovered the twelve bodies and the community laid them to rest in a communal grave. On December 10 a posse caught up with the outlaws. A gun battle ensued, killing one member of the posse. The posse prevailed, though, shooting one outlaw dead; another of the gang drowned in the surf during the fracas. Lynch and two other men were captured, confessed and were executed by a firing squad on December 28, 1848. The dead posse man’s widow received what was recovered of the outlaws’ loot.
Visitors and area residents report not only strange white lights around the mission, but hearing muffled screams and seeing the spectral forms of a man in a blue peacoat and a lady in white, matching descriptions of Reed and his wife. But no one’s yet seen Reed’s gold.
When the Pennsylvania Dutch began immigrating from Germany in the 18th century, they brought with them a tradition of folk magic and healing called pow-wowing; on November 27, 1928, that ritual would lead to murder.
John Blymire, born in York, Pa., in 1895, was by all accounts an unremarkable boy in all but one respect. He wasn’t bright, popular or good looking, but he shared his father and grandfather’s legacy: the supernatural. Like his forebears, Blymire was said to have healing powers. When he was just five years old, he seemed to be wasting away. We might attribute that to malnutrition; his kin blamed it on a hex and took him to the area’s most renowned “hexenmeister,” Nelson Rehmeyer. Rehmeyer cured the boy. Blymire worked in Rehmeyer’s garden for some time, and developed his own reputation as a healer.
Yet he was periodically convinced that he was under a hex again himself, and he met others who thought they suffered the same problem. One such hexing victim was Milton J. Hess, a prosperous farmer who’d encountered recent bad luck; another was John Curry, an abused 14-year old who worked at a cigar factory with Blymire. Blymire consulted with Nellie Noll, known as the River Witch of Marietta. She told him that Rehmeyer was behind all three hexes, and that they could break them by burning Rehmeyer’s copy of pow-wow’s foundational book, Long Lost Friend.
Blymire and Curry visited Rehmeyer’s small farmhouse. The three chatted for some time, while Blymire tried to compel Rehmeyer mentally to give him the book. Unsurprisingly, this tactic failed. The night before Thanksgiving, Blymire and Curry returned, this time with Hess’s brother Clayton—and some rope. Blymire strangled Rehmeyer, Curry hit him over the head with a block of wood, and he died. They set the house on fire to get rid of the evidence, but failed to burn it down. After a neighbor discovered Rehmeyer’s body, the police soon found the three perpetrators, and they each confessed, were tried and were found guilty.
Rehmeyer’s great-grandson has restored the Rehmeyer house and hopes to use it to highlight Pennsylvania Dutch history. The story of the hex murder and the idea of the haunting presence of the wronged witch are the main draw.
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