THE DISTURBING CASE OF CARL TANZLER

hey guys it's bella welcome back to my channel i hope you guys are all having a wonderful day today in today's video we are going to be covering a case that is odd to say the least i have just been really intrigued by just weird bizarre cases lately you may have noticed and boy is today's case bizarre so hold on tight spider monkey before we do get into it i just quickly want to thank today sponsor majuri for making this video possible i am so incredibly grateful and excited to be working with majuri again one of my absolute favorite brands of all time i think you guys already know it's where i get all of my jewelry from because their pieces are just so classic and timeless and not to mention amazing quality and i just feel so much more put together when i have my majeuri pieces on they really just elevate any look whether it's a nighttime look a going out look or just an everyday look it just makes me feel like i've got my together you know i'm also wearing some of my absolute favorite majority pieces at the moment so i've got on the pave diamond midi hoops and also the pave diamond u hoops and then i'm also wearing the moonstone sphere pendant and the diamonds line necklace and i just love how it all goes together so beautifully because the pieces are very minimal and very classic majuri has such amazing values as well their team is made up of over 75 women and their 14 karat gold pieces are made from 40 certified recycled gold with a commitment to make that 70 by this year which is amazing so if you guys are interested in checking out any of the incredible majori pieces i will leave the link in my description down below so make sure you check that out i will link all of the pieces i'm wearing as well they're amazing and madurai also releases new pieces every single monday so there's always something to look forward to so make sure you check out the description all of the information will be there and let's go ahead and get into today's case so like i said today we're going to be talking about the case of karl tanzler and i'm going to give you a little background information on him because he had a very interesting early life he was born in 1877 in dresden in germany where he grew up with his sister and he was also incredibly smart and he was very interested in electricity chemical experiments flying machines astronomy and all phenomena of the universe and he even actually built himself a glider plane while he was in school he studied medicine in university and he did obtain some credentials but none of them actually qualified him as a real doctor i believe he studied quite a few things in university actually i read his auto biography and he said he didn't smoke or drink during university because he was too engrossed in his studies and by age 24 he took his final degrees as a master in arts of medicine philosophy mathematics physics and chemistry so he's a very smart guy and he definitely got around too he had traveled from germany to india i'm not sure how long he was in india for but he then traveled from india to sydney and australia before the outbreak of world war one and he worked there for the government as a civil electrical engineer and an x-ray expert so a man of many trades apparently like this guy has done everything after about 10 years in australia he had just begun building a trans ocean flyer when the war broke out in 1914 and the british military placed him in a concentration camp and then after the war ended in 1918 former prisoners weren't allowed to stay in australia i mean i'm not sure why he was considered a prisoner but because of that he was deported to holland once in holland he set out to find his mother who he hadn't heard from since the start of the war so he traveled back to germany and he found her and he stayed with her for two years and then in 1920 he met a woman named doris schaefer and they got married they had two daughters named aisha and clarista and in 1926 they emigrated to the united states and settled in zephyr hills in florida which is actually where his sister had already emigrated to as well and then about a year after moving to florida carl just up and abandoned his family and moved to key west still in florida where he got a job as a radiologist at the u.s marine hospital under the name count carl von kossel um and just a little side note here but carl was actually a man of many names on his u.s citizenship papers he was listed as karl tanzler von kossel on his german marriage certificate he was listed as george karl tanzler and then eventually on his death certificate he went by just karl tanzler anyway carl was described as an odd guy he was just a little bit off uh he was arrogant and egotistical and opinionated and he was working in the tuberculosis unit of the hospital which tuberculosis at the time had no cure and so he would say that he could cure it and he had a cure but he never did anything to back these claims up and then on the 22nd of april in 1930 while working at the hospital he met 22 year old maria elena milago de hoyas um but she went by helen so that's what i'll be referring to her as in this video she was cuban american and was born in key west in florida in 1909 and she was a beautiful girl she was the daughter of francisco who was a cigar maker and aurora who was a homemaker and she was raised with two sisters florinda who went by nana and celia and on the 22nd of april she was brought into the hospital after she became ill with tuberculosis and immediately carl was enamored with her particularly because of these premonitions that he had when he was 12 and living in germany he experienced these visions where his ancestor countess anna who had apparently been haunting his family home in germany for years she came to him in these visions and showed him the woman that he was destined for and she was this exotic-looking dark-haired woman and carl said that when he saw her in these visions she was too beautiful to even describe and when helen came into the hospital ill with tuberculosis he said helen was the woman from these visions she was beautiful she had dark hair and she was just stunning she was also legally married at this time though to a man named louis they had gotten married a few years earlier in 1926 but he had actually left helen after she suffered a miscarriage and he just left here ben and her and he moved to miami so they hadn't spoken in a while but she was on paper still legally married and also i just want to mention again she was 22 years old at the time which i think is important to mention because carl was 55 years old at the time so just a mere 33 year age gap and he just became totally obsessed with her as i mentioned in the 1900s tuberculosis was considered a fatal disease there was no cure for it and so helen actually was sent home she decided to go home to her family home so she could spend what time she had left with her family but carl could not accept this he was determined to save her because she was the love of his life and he proclaimed his love to her he showered her in gifts of jewelry and clothing none of which she reciprocated might i add her parents like her family said that she wasn't interested but she just didn't directly turn down his advances because she didn't want to deal with the repercussions of rejecting someone who was trying to save her life i guess he would at his own home make her tonics and elixirs and medicines and he would then bring them to helen's family home and administer them to her in an effort to save her life and he even stole equipment from the hospital he stole x-ray machines and electrical equipment and brought them to helen's house to try and save her because he was obsessed with her unfortunately despite carl's best efforts helen passed away on the 25th of october in 1931 and carl was devastated and he also blamed her family he called them ignorant indignant and said that they were ungrateful for his help which i mean i can't imagine why right it's like this 55 year old guy hitting on their 22 year old terminally ill daughter and sister while she was never interested and the only reason she didn't directly turn him down was because he was her doctor and he claims in his autobiography that she seemed dependent on him and that she was begging him for his medical help but her family say otherwise and he also says in his autobiography that her you know not coming onto him and not accepting his advances was just her holding back anyway like i said after she passed carl was heartbroken and he actually ended up buying the house that she lived in so that he could sleep in her bed because it still smelled like her he also insisted on paying for her funeral which helen's family allowed and he also insisted on commissioning her a mausoleum like an above-ground mausoleum because he didn't want helen to be buried underground and risk dirt and moisture and water getting into her coffin he wanted to preserve her as much as possible he even hired a mortician to prepare her body before putting it in the mausoleum and this mausoleum was placed in the key west cemetery and helen's family approved of all of this but what they didn't know was that carl actually had the only key to the tomb he visited her every night in the mausoleum for the next two years he would bring formaldehyde with him to try and preserve her body but he did a really bad job of this so it didn't actually work and he also tried to force feed her corpse with a tube and even tried to force-feed her corpse with his own mouth in an attempt to get her to regain weight and fluids yeah he did this every night for two years he visited her every single night in the mausoleum for two years until eventually he claims that helen started speaking to him and so he would serenade her every night with his favorite spanish song and then eventually she apparently started asking him to take her home and to take her out of the mausoleum and so one night in april 1933 out of the mausoleum and so one night in april 1933 he actually took her body out of the grave and it was after dark so no one would see he carted her body through the cemetery in a toy wagon and brought her to his house and i mean she had passed away two years before this so i cannot imagine the smell i can't imagine what her body would have looked like at this point because yes he was bringing formaldehyde but he wasn't doing it well so it didn't really work and the state of decomposition a body would be in after two years is insane the body starts to liquefy after just one month so she probably would have been almost just a skeleton by this point so he starts trying to bring her body back to what it looked like before she passed away and he had actually kind of fashioned this makeshift laboratory out of an old aeroplane that he had on his property and inside this airplane is where he kept her body or this airplane makeshift laboratory i don't really know what you want to call it he brought her body into there and he would kind of diy trying to stop her body from decomposing even more he attached her bones together using piano wire and coat hangers to try and stabilize her skeletal frame her eyes had decomposed and had sunken in so he created these glass eyes and put them in her eye sockets to maintain the integrity of her face he stuffed her torso and her abdominal cavity with rags because it had started to like cave in as she decomposed her skin was also mostly decomposed so he replaced her skin with silk japanese silk that have been soaked in wax and plaster of paris which is basically like a white powder made from calcium sulfate hemohydrate so basically he paper machade her body with silk and he also made her a wig out of his own mother's hair which is so insane i mean this whole thing is so insane he even dressed her in gloves stockings jewelry and the clothes that she had apparently been wearing the day that she passed away which i don't even know how he got his hands on those to be honest i mean maybe it was like the clothes she was buried in so he cleaned those up and used those i'm not really sure and he also made multiple death masks of her face and a death mask is where you replicate someone's face who has just passed away but he didn't just replicate her face he used an actual imprint of her face to create these death masks and he had multiple he then kept her body in his bed for the next seven years he slept beside her he kissed her he treated her like she was still alive and he actually wrote about this in his autobiography in far too much detail even going as far to say that he got embalming fluid on himself when they kissed he claimed that sometimes she would awaken only to die again moments later and apparently she spoke to him constantly validating what he was doing to her body and what's so disgusting to me is that he made a paper tube and placed it between her legs to make penetration easier so he made her a makeshift vagina he was having sex with helen's corpse which is just so extremely tragic to have your body defiled like that for seven years it's just so incredibly disgusting that i don't even have words obviously the body and his house also smelled incredibly bad because it had been decomposing for nine years two years in the mausoleum and then another seven years in his house and he would try and mask the odor with perfume and disinfectant but it just didn't work it just smelled too bad and you know perfume doesn't really it smells good but it doesn't mask the smell of bad odor kind of meshes with it you know like if you have bo and you put perfume on you're gonna smell like a mixture of bo and perfume now over the next seven years while he lived with the body in his house the people of the town actually kind of caught a whiff of it no pun intended actually i didn't mean to do that but there were rumors going around about this man who was like a major recluse but he was sometimes seen in town purchasing perfume and women's clothing and at one point a young boy actually saw him through the window in his house dancing with helen's body which at the time the boy thought was a giant doll these rumors eventually started getting back to helen's sister nana and so in 1940 she went straight to carl's house to confront him and when she got there through the window she saw him dancing with what appeared to be a giant doll that looked like her sister so she immediately called the authorities the authorities came and determined that that giant doll was in fact the body of her sister helen carl was immediately arrested for grave rubbing and maliciously destroying a grave and a psychiatric evaluation was conducted and determined that carl was competent to stand trial and what's crazy is that during this trial he admitted that his ultimate plans were to send her body into space and let me quote he wanted to fly her high into the stratosphere so that radiation from out of space could penetrate her tissues and restore her life to her somnolent form now after spending a couple of months in prison awaiting trial in a twist of events turns out the statute of limitations was up for his crimes it had run out and so he was free to go just like that which is nuts to me i've never truly understood statute of limitations because investigations can take a really long time especially in cases like this where the authorities don't even know that it's happened nobody knew until nine years after she passed away and i've said this before and i'll say it again but the statute of limitations feels to me like you're just rewarding criminals for getting away with their crimes for long enough and when he got out of prison too like he just went guns blazing he talked about how he felt like he was demonized in the media he talked badly about helen's family he said helen's sister nana only contacted the authorities because she was greedy and wanted helen's jewelry for herself this case actually blew up in the media too which is why he says that he was demonized in the media because obviously once the media found out what had happened it was just like a frenzy because this case was just so insane to the point where once helen's body was discovered and recovered she didn't even get a proper burial they put her body on display at the dean lopez funeral home for anyone to see and like i said this case was huge in the media and people heard about it could not believe it and so they would go and visit the body out of morbid curiosity and almost 7 000 people went to see the body so after nine years of having her body defiled she still didn't even get a proper burial straight away but eventually she was buried in an unmarked grave at key west cemetery in florida and the reason it's unmarked and nobody knows where it is is so that nobody can go and do this to her body again i think one of the craziest parts about this case as well is that once carl was released from prison and the charges were dropped because of the statute of limitations carl actually received so much compassion he received basically fan mail from people telling him that what he did was romantic and that his devotion to helen was resolute and passionate women would even write him love letters and proposition themselves to sleep with him let me read you what the start of his autobiography like starts off with the first paragraph of his autobiography when in november 1940 i was finally released from prison i was a very bitter man charges have been brought against me that i was a violator of the grave a ghoul a fiend of society there was an avalanche of misrepresentations of sensational press stories which accused me of being a sexual pervert a necromancer a maniac while being confined for court hearing worst of all they removed elena's body i would say you are all of those things based off the evidence of you literally doing those things but you know he goes on to say that at that point he felt like life had no meaning he was 64. he'd lost his employment he'd lost his home he had people saying terrible things about him in the media for good reason but that he was brought back to life when he got home and started receiving hundreds of letters from people all over the world and had thousands of visitors come to see him to say that they didn't believe that he had committed a crime eventually in 1944 he moved to pasco county and he lived really close to his first wife doris and actually 10 years prior to this in 1934 one of his and doris's daughters clarista had actually passed away of diphtheria while he was off defiling a corpse but he and doris actually did start talking again she was very supportive of him but they never got back together because he actually lived alone and he remained alone for the rest of his life until his death and he lived by himself with a life-sized effigy of helen because he still had those death masks that he had made of her and he placed one of these death masks on this effigy of helen which basically an effigy is like a life-skies life-sized sculptural representation of a particular person and he lived alone with this effigy until he died at age 75 on the 3rd of july in 1952. his body was discovered on the floor of his home three weeks after his death some say he was found in the arms of helen's effigy but his obituary reported that he died on the floor behind one of his organs which i don't know if he like took one of his organs out or if it was like one of helen's organs he's managed to keep or whatever but it's just so incredibly creepy either way but that's everything for this case and if you guys actually do want to read more about this case i recommend reading his autobiography it's called the secrets of elena's tomb the confessions of carl von kossel and it's really not that long so definitely recommend checking that out if you want to read any more on it it's just kind of weird um reading it because when you know the story and kind of the background and that he was really odd it just gives a really weird very eerie creepy feeling to reading that book but that's everything for me today guys i would love to discuss your thoughts in the comments down below because this was definitely a wild case it's so nuts it's so incredibly sad for helen that she couldn't even be at peace in death she had some creepy old man defiling her corpse for nine years i mean that's that's just heartbreaking but that's all from me i hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your day and hopefully i will see you in my next video bye guys

Channel: Bella Fiori

Views: 415,270

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Id: NHVV21tk7AA

Length: 22min 33sec (1353 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 17 2022