leVeLlEd CRimE

1. Stella Maris College Rugby Team

    Uruguay

On October 13, 1972 the team was on its way from Montevideo, Uruguay to play a match in Santiago Chile. Fierce wind and snow hounded the flight as the plane trekked through the Andes mountains. Due to poor weather and pilot error the plane crashed atop of an unnamed mountain on the border of Chile and Argentina. Search parties from three countries searched for 11 days in vain to find the downed flight of 45 people but were unsuccessful and all passengers were presumed dead. What followed next is one of the greatest examples of human survival ever recorded. Despite no food or heat 16 members of the team stayed on top of the mountain for over two months through the brutal winter while being forced to eat the remains of their fallen teammates before finally being rescued.

2.Armin Meiwes

By most accounts Meiwes was a depraved and pathetic individual from Roteburg, Germany. In 2001 he posted an advertisement on an internet site which read in part “looking for a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed”. Unbelievably Meiwes received a serious response from a willing participant. The two men met on Christmas Day and proceeded to commit and videotape some of the most unimaginable acts on earth. Meiwes was arrested after revealing details of his crime. He is currently serving a life sentence in a German prison.

3. Mauerova family

The Mauerova’s are a family of cult members and cannibals from the Czech Republic. Over an 8 month period, relatives and fellow cult members participated in despicable acts against two brothers. The actual details of what a mother allowed to be done to her young children are extremely disturbing. By a remarkable chain of events, the truth about the Maurova family was discovered on May 10, 2007 when horrific images on a baby monitor (which they had installed in their house to view the crimes) where picked up by a neighbor who had the exact same monitor. A total of six people were eventually convicted.

4. Albert Fish

Albert Fish was a true life monster in every sense of the word. He was sadistic, delusional and worst of all he received gratification from his repulsive acts. Besides being an admitted serial killer and cannibal, he was also a rampant pedophile and a deviant. Fish kidnapped, murdered, and consumed a 10 year old girl from Manhattan. Six years later Fish taunted the innocent girl’s family by sending a letter to them graphically detailing his crime and the pleasure he received committing it. The letter was traced back to him and he was arrested and convicted. Justice would be served on January 16, 1936 as Fish was executed at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in upstate New York.

5. Delphine LaLaurie

La Laurie was a sadistic socialite who lived in New Orleans. Her home was a chamber of horrors. On April 10, 1834, a fire broke out in the mansion’s kitchen, and firefighters found two slaves chained to the stove. They appeared to have started the fire themselves, in order to attract attention. The firefighters were lead by other slaves to the attic, where the real surprise was. Over a dozen disfigured and maimed slaves were manacled to the walls or floors. Several had been the subjects of gruesome medical experiments. One man appeared to be part of some bizarre sex change, a woman was trapped in a small cage with her limbs broken and reset to look like a crab, and another woman with arms and legs removed, and patches of her flesh sliced off in a circular motion to resemble a caterpillar. Some had had their mouths sewn shut, and had subsequently starved to death, whilst others had their hands sewn to different parts of their bodies. Most were found dead, but some were alive and begging to be killed, to release them from the pain. LaLaurie fled before she could be bought to justice – she was never caught.

6. Shirō Ishii

Ishii was a microbiologist and the lieutenant general of Unit 731, a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He was born in the former Shibayama Village of Sanbu District in Chiba Prefecture, and studied medicine at Kyoto Imperial University. In 1932, he began his preliminary experiments in biological warfare as a secret project for the Japanese military. In 1936, Unit 731 was formed. Ishii built a huge compound — more than 150 buildings over six square kilometers — outside the city of Harbin, China.

Some of the numerous atrocities committed by Ishii, and others under his command in Unit 731, include: vivisection of living people (including pregnant women who were impregnated by the doctors), prisoners had limbs amputated and reattached to other parts of their body, some prisoners had parts of their bodies frozen and thawed to study the resulting untreated gangrene. Humans were also used as living test cases for grenades and flame throwers. Prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea via rape, then studied. A complete list of these horrors can be found here.

Having been granted immunity by the American Occupation Authorities at the end of the war, Ishii never spent any time in jail for his crimes and died at the age of 67, of throat cancer.

7. Ivan IV of Russia

Ivan IV of Russia, also know as Ivan the Terrible, was the Grand Duke of Muscovy, from 1533 to 1547, and was the first ruler of Russia to assume the title of Tsar. In 1570, Ivan was under the belief that the elite of the city of Novgorod planned to defect to Poland, and led an army to stop them, on January 2. Ivan’s soldiers built walls around the perimeter of the city in order to prevent the people of the city escaping. Between 500 and 1000 people were gathered every day by the troops, then tortured and killed in front of Ivan and his son. In 1581, Ivan beat his pregnant daughter-in-law for wearing immodest clothing, causing a miscarriage. His son, also named Ivan, upon learning of this, engaged in a heated argument with his father, which resulted in Ivan striking his son in the head with his pointed staff, causing his son’s (accidental) death.

8. Jiang Qing

Jiang Qing was the wife of Mao Tse-tung, the Communist dictator of China. Through clever maneuvering, she managed to reach the highest position of power within the communist party (short of being President). It is believed that she was the main driving force behind China’s Cultural Revolution (of which she was the deputy director). During the Cultural Revolution, much economic activity was halted, and countless ancient buildings, artifacts, antiques, books and paintings were destroyed by Red Guards. The 10 years of the Cultural Revolution also brought the education system to a virtual halt, and many intellectuals were sent to prison camps. Millions of people in China, reportedly, had their human rights annulled during the Cultural Revolution. Millions more were also forcibly displaced. Estimates of the death toll – civilians and Red Guards – from various Western and Eastern sources are about 500,000 in the true years of chaos of 1966—1969, but some estimates are as high as 3 million deaths, with 36 million being persecuted.