Vampires Through the Ages (17 page)

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.