The Frog Boys:
were a group of five South Korean boys who disappeared on March 26, 1991. The boys had gone to nearby Mount Waryong to catch frogs but never returned. Their bodies were found 11 years later. Although it was discovered that they had been murdered, the case has never been solved.
March 26, 1991 was a national holiday in South Korea owing to the 1991 local elections; the boys decided to spend the day catching frogs in the streams of Mount Waryong. After they were reported missing, their story became a national sensation. President Roh Tae-woo sent 300,000 police officers to search for the missing boys, with the searches shown live on TV. Several of the boys’ parents left their jobs to travel around the country to look for their children.During the search, the police received over 550 false leads. Mount Waryong was searched more than 500 times before the boys were found.
In 2002, a man searching for acorns discovered their bodies in an area of the mountain that had already been searched. He first reported the remains via an anonymous phone call. Initially, the police stated that they thought the boys had died of hypothermia. However, the parents did not accept that conclusion and demanded a full investigation. The families questioned the conclusion that the boys had simply died after getting lost due to the oddities of the boys’ clothes being found tied in knots and of their bodies being found a short distance from the village in an area the boys knew very well. Forensic experts discovered that the boys had been murdered with repeated blows to the head and that one had been shot in the head with a shotgun. In 2006, the statute of limitations expired on the boys’ quintuple murder case, so even if it was solved, they would be unable to prosecute anyone for the murders. The police said that they would nevertheless continue their investigation, to uncover the truth. A funeral service was held for the boys on March 25, 2004, and their skulls were donated to medical research.
Anonymous: hi
Andrei Chikatilo:
was a Ukrainian serial killer, nicknamed the Butcher of Rostov and ‘The Red Ripper.’ He was convicted of the murder of 53 women and children between 1978 and 1990. In 1978, Chikatilo moved to Shakhty, a small coal mining town near Rostov, where he committed his first documented murder. On December 22, he lured a nine-year-old girl to an old house which he bought in secret from his family and attempted to rape her. When the girl struggled, he stabbed her to death. He ejaculated in the process of knifing the child, and from then on he was only able to achieve sexual arousal and orgasm through stabbing and slashing women and children to death. Despite evidence linking Chikatilo to the girl’s death, a young man, Alexsandr Kravchenko, was arrested and later tried and executed for the crime.
He established a pattern of approaching runaways and young vagrants at bus or railway stations and enticing them to leave. A quick trip into a nearby forest was the scene for the victim’s death. In 1983, he did not kill until June, but then he murdered four victims before September. The victims were all women and children. The adult females were often prostitutes or homeless tramps who could be lured with promises of alcohol or money. Chikatilo would usually attempt intercourse with these victims, but would usually be unable to get an erection, which would send him into a murderous fury. The child victims were of both sexes, and Chikatilo would lure them away with his friendly, talkative manner by promising them toys or candy. In the USSR at the time, reports of crimes like child rape and serial murder were often suppressed by the state-controlled media, as such crimes were regarded as being common only in “hedonistic capitalist nations.”
In 1988 Chikatilo resumed killing, generally keeping his activities far from the Rostov area. He murdered a woman in Krasny-Sulin in April and went on to kill another eight people that year, including two victims in Shakhty. Again there was a long lapse before Chikatilo resumed killing, murdering seven boys and two women between January and November of 1990. He was finally caught when trying to approach young children whilst under police surveillance. He went to trial on April 14, 1992. Despite his odd and disruptive behavior in court, he was judged fit to stand trial. During the trial he was famously kept in a cage in the center of the courtroom; it was constructed for his own protection from the relatives of the deceased. The trial had a very disturbing atmosphere. The relatives kept shouting threats and insults to Chikatilo, demanding the authorities to release him so that they could execute him on their own. He was found guilty of 52 of the 53 murders and sentenced to death for each offense.
He was executed by firing squad (shot in the back of the head) on February 14, 1994 after Russian president Boris Yeltsin refused a last ditch appeal by Chikatilo for clemency.
Valerian was a noble Roman who became Emperor Valerian I. During his disastrous reign, the western empire fell into total disrepair. In 260 AD, Valerian was defeated in the Battle of Edessa and taken captive by the Persian King Shapur I. In order to humiliate the Emperor, Shapur used him as a footstool. When he grew tired of his footstool, Shapur had Valerian skinned and had his skin stuffed with dung and straw and put on display in one of the large Persian temples.
Everyone has heard of Stonehenge, but few know the Carnac Stones. These are 3,000 megalithic stones arranged in perfect lines over a distance of 12 kilometers on the coast of Brittany in the North-West of France. Mythology surrounding the stones says that each stone is a soldier in a Roman legion that Merlin the Wizard turned in to stone. Scientific attempts at an explanation suggests that the stones are most likely an elaborate earthquake detector. The identity of the Neolithic people who built them is unknown.
Raymond “Ray” Robinson:
(October 29, 1910 – June 11, 1985) was a severely disfigured man whose years of nighttime walks made him into a figure of urban legend in western Pennsylvania. Robinson was so badly injured in a childhood electrical accident that he could not go out in public without fear of creating a panic, so he went for long walks after dark. Local residents (who would drive his road in hopes of meeting him) called him The Green Man or Charlie No-Face, and they passed on tales about him to their children and grandchildren. Teenagers raised on these tales are sometimes surprised to discover that the mythic boogeyman was a real person, well liked by his neighbors and his family.
James Bulger’s mother left her two-year-old son at the butcher shop’s door thinking that it would not take her long to return, since there was no queue in the store. Little did she know that it would be her last time she would see her son alive.
Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, who were at the same mall as the Bulgers, were participating in their usual activities: skipping class, browsing the stores, pocketing things when the salespeople turned their backs, and climbing chairs in the restaurants until they were chased out. The boys came up with an idea to have a little boy get lost outside so that he would get knocked over by a vehicle. It was reported that the boys had a similar previous attempt on a boy before James, which failed because the mother had become aware of her missing child and found him before they could take him outside.
During their two-mile walk, the 10-year-old boys had punched, kicked, picked up and dropped James on his head. Some of the acts were seen by passersby who ignored them, thinking that they were just two older brothers who didn’t know how to take care of their younger brother. Jon and Robert brought James onto the local railway, where they flung paint in his left eye, threw stones at him, beat him with bricks, and hit him with an iron bar. They also sexually assaulted him and laid his body on the railroad track, covering his bleeding head with bricks when they thought he was dead. It was reported that James died sometime before the train hit him.
Republican marriage:
(French: mariage républicain) was a form of execution that allegedly occurred in Nantes during the Reign of Terror in Revolutionary France and “involved tying a naked man and woman together and drowning them”. This was reported to have been practiced during the noyades massacres that were ordered by local Jacobin representative-on-mission Jean-Baptiste Carrier between November 1793 and January 1794 in the city of Nantes. Most accounts indicate that the victims were drowned in the Loire River, although a few sources describe an alternative means of execution in which the bound couple is run through with a sword, either before, or instead of drowning.
The Head of Diogo Alves:
Diogo Alves, Spanish born in Santa Gertrudes, came to live in Lisbon and while still new, became known as the Aqueduct killer from 1836 to 1839. It is at this location that he perpetrated several heinous crimes, many of them (it is thought) instigated by his companion Gertrude Mary, nicknamed “the Parreirinha ”. He was eventually caught by the authorities in 1840 following the murder of a family in whose house he had assaulted a doctor. For this he was sentenced to hang.
The story of Diogo Alves, whose death sentence was imposed on February 19 in 1841, intrigued scientists at the Medical-Surgical School of Lisbon. In an attempt to understand the origin of his perfidy after the hanging they obtained for study his severed head. This surprisingly to this day is preserved in a glass container, where a solution of formaldehyde it has perpetuated the image of man with calm air - quite contrary to what he was in his violent life. Scientists will never be able to explain what led him to acquire a false key of the Aqueduct, where he hid, to rob the people passing, shooting them in the aqueducts shadows. At the time, people came to think of it as a wave of unexplained suicides, but many deaths were occured - it took a family of four victims to finally discover that it was all the work of a criminal.
The severed head is currently in the anatomical theater of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon, following the formation of a cabinet of phrenology by José Lourenço Gomes da Luz, which allowed the preservation of the skull together with Diogo Alves de Matos Lobo (considered by some the last guy to receive the death penalty in Portugal in a rather significant judicial history of Portugal) in the old school medical-surgery. The head of Diogo Alves was one of the most significant objects - and certainly more horrific - in the exhibition “Passages. One hundred parts for the Museum of Medicine “, held at the National Museum of Ancient Art in 2005.
Trichophagia:
is the compulsive eating of hair. Most often, long hair is chewed while still attached to the head and then swallowed. The hair eventually collects in the gastrointestinal tract causing symptoms such as indigestion and stomach pain. In some cases, surgery may be required to remove the mass as shown in the picture below. The hairball weighed 10lbs and was taken from the stomach of an eighteen year-old Chicago woman
