Alone in the dark… a creeping shadow, echoing footsteps behind you… You’re in fear for your life! Let it not be… Murder!
The basis for many old time radio shows are the legends of mythical killers. This sort of macabre history isn’t taught in school, so our Curator has compiled a list of the most common names you may encounter in your auditory journeys. Some are just urban legend, some are real enough, but have broken with history to take on a mythology of their own. These are the killers that will keep you… Awake at Midnight!
Burke & Hare
Known as “resurrection men,” in 1828 Scotland, sixteen murders were committed by this pair of grave-robbers. Paid to supply the medical establishment with cadavers for study, they became entrepreneurs when their legal supply of corpses dried up.
Can be heard in: Suspense: “The Body Snatchers”
Countess Bathory
During the late 1500s, “The Blood Countess” Erzsébet Báthory would conscript young women from the countryside she ruled over to act as servants in her castle… then torture them to death.
Lizzie Borden
“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks…” In 1892, Lizzie A. Borden was acquitted of the murders of her mother and stepfather, but the notoriety of the real-life Massachusetts court case and subsequent speculation secured her a name in our list of legendary killers.
Neill Cream
“The Lambeth Poisoner.” In the 1880s, he could make a Chicago man’s problems disappear… with chloroform or strychnine poisoning. He then moved to London, where a rash of young women were found killed by poison. In 1892 a letter purporting to be from Jack the Ripper declared Dr. Neill innocent!
Can be heard in: Suspense: “Doctor of Poison”
The King’s Executioner
Charles-Henri Sanson was The King’s Executioner/High Executioner both before and after the French Revolution. Sanson made his mark on history by legally putting over three thousand people to death… including King Louis XVI himself! He was the fourth in a six-generation long family of executioners!
Jack the Ripper
In 1888, in the Whitechapel district of London, were a series of brutally sadistic and very real murders, all of young women. To this day the murders have never been solved. (NOT to be confused with Spring-Heeled Jack, another monster from Victorian England.)
Can be heard in: Molle Mystery Theater: “Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper” (by Robert Bloch)
Gilles de Rais
Although this war hero started out fighting alongside of Joan of Arc, it was later revealed that he was both obsessed with the occult… and a mass murderer of children! He was hung for it, but he made history as the basis for the story of Bluebeard. Modern occultists have speculated that he was the victim of a witch hunt, forced to plead guilty to crimes he did not commit, but the legend persists.
Rasputin
Grigori Rasputin was a real-life wandering mystic (some say a master of the occult,) until becoming an advisor to the Tsar of Russia. He was assassinated in 1916 during World War I, having influenced the fall of the Romanov Dynasty with his unfavorable political influence over the family.
Svengali
Was a fictional character in George du Maurier’s 1895 novel Trilby. He used animal magnetism (during a time when hypnotism was widely seen as mystical) to influence a young woman into doing his will. At first Trilby becomes a great singer, then she descends into a state of consciousness removed from life, a slave in love with her evil manipulator.
Sweeney Todd
“The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is a fictional character based on urban legend. He first appeared as the villain of the Victorian penny dreadful serial ”The String of Pearls” in 1846. He has since been the subject of countless plays, musicals, and motion pictures. “I’ll polish him off…”
