The dismembered body of a young woman whose arm has never been found. The massacred body of the girl, devoid of nipples with a razor blade. A woman's hand, sticking out of a shallow grave. More than one star brutal "The End" met much earlier than she expected ...
Jane, Karin, Linda and Natalie. Each of them was beautiful, talented and thirsty for a great career, and the world was open to them. They had something else in common. They were all brutally murdered.
Serial killer in the services of Scientologists?
Twenty-eight-year-old Evelyn Jane King has participated in six series. 1977 was to be a turning point for her. It was the first time she was going to appear in a movie. On the morning of November 10, she left for test shooting.
She never made it to the studio. Kenneth Bianchi, a security agent by profession, a serial killer by passion, known as the "Strangler from the Hills" . Young women were his victims. First, he brutally raped them, then tied and strangled them, and then abandoned their bodies.
Kenneth Bianchi, or "The Strangler from the Hills" in a 1979 police photograph (source:Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, public domain).
Jane King was found a week later in the northern hills of Los Angeles. However, the body of the young actress did not fit the pattern of the crimes of the "strangler". The body had been carefully dismembered .
Feet and hands lay between the head and torso. Both legs and the left arm were hit a few meters away. Perhaps they were carried by game. The left arm was never found. The eyes still open seemed to be watching the policemen . It was established that the remains of the woman had not been thrown out of the car, as was the case in other cases, but had been carefully arranged.
Despite these differences, the police decided to classify Jane's death as the act of the same serial killer who had at least eleven victims to his credit.
A few years ago, a new theory about the murder of Jane King surfaced. her ties to the Church of Scientologists have come to light and desperate attempts to sever contacts with its representatives. Could the actress's desire to leave the Church the cause of her murder, and Bianchi was only a tool in the hands of the sect?
It was close, and Bianchi would also kill Catherine Lorre, daughter of the famous actor Peter Lorre, who played in "Casablanca", among others. Pictured here is a scene from the 1941 movie "Maltese Falcon" - Peter Lorre holding a pistol, Sydney Greenstreet below (source:public domain).
Under the pianist's bed
Karin Irene Schlegel from New York had everything a 24-year-old could dream of. Good job, money and a great book debut. However, it was not enough for a woman who - as you can learn from the new CBS Reality series entitled "Fame kills" - wanted to be an actress since she was a child.
In 1974, she found an advertisement in the local press. Piano teacher Charles Yukl was just starting work on his first commercial and needed a young actress. The hearing was scheduled for August 20 at 9pm at his apartment at 120 Waverly Place.
Friends advised Karin against an evening visit to the private house of an unknown man . However, the desire to be an actress turned out to be stronger.
As soon as Karin entered the pianist's apartment, the pianist threw himself at her and began to choke her with his tie. He did it so hard he broke her neck. Then he struck with all his might the woman's now dead body and stripped the massacred body naked. When he got tired, he pulled a razor blade from his pockets and began to cut it.
Karin even published a book, "Houses Architects Design for Themselves" (McGraw-Hill 1974), but she wanted more fame ... The photo shows the cover of her work and the title page of the continuation of the book, which she could no longer participate in preparation ...
At the same time, Charles's wife called to say that he would be home in a quarter of an hour. The latter quickly wrapped Karin's body in foil and hid it under the double bed. Mrs. Enken Yukl did not notice any traces of blood in the apartment. She was also unaware that the night she had sex with her husband, a massacred body lay under their bed young woman. Or maybe she didn't want to see anything?
The next morning, as soon as his wife left for work, Charles took Karin's body, carried it to the roof of his apartment building, and left it there. He hid all her belongings in the garbage can.
Karin found the building's caretaker. The condition of the body was appalling. The naked woman had her throat slit and her nipples cut . The body was incised with a razor blade, especially the breasts and vagina. An autopsy showed that the clitoris was not severed. After her death, the woman was also raped.
Instead of staying with the piano, Charles Yukl decided to go down the road of murder ... (photo:Gryffindor, license CC BY-SA 3.0).
Evidence gathered by police officers allowed Charles to be charged with murder. Due to legal errors during the trial, the court sentenced the pianist to only fifteen years prisons. His wife has never been charged. After a few days in jail, Yukl hanged himself in his cell.
One in a thousand
Twenty-five miles north of Los Angeles is a national park. There, on November 23, 1995, rangers made a gruesome discovery. A woman's arm was sticking out of the ground. It quickly turned out that it was the body of a model and aspiring actress, 27-year-old Linda Sobek, who had disappeared eight days earlier. When she was last seen, she was going to a photo session for the episode of the series "World according to the Bundes".
The police quickly found the murdered belongings, including a car rental bill in the name of photographer Charles E. Rathbun. Thus, he became the prime suspect. Already at the first questioning, the man confessed to killing Linda. According to his version, the model's death was caused by an accident during a photo shoot in the Mojave Desert.
Rathbun was about to hit Linda during the spinning top of the car. As a result of the injuries, the woman died, and the panicked photographer hid her body in a shallow grave and escaped .
Mojave Desert. According to Rathbun, a car accident in these natural circumstances resulted in Linda's death. Nobody believed him ... (photo:Scottthezombie at English Wikipedia, license CC BY-SA 3.0).
As you can see from the TV series "Sława kills", the version of the suspect immediately seemed untrue to the police. An autopsy revealed that Linda Sobek's body had no injuries indicating a vehicle impact. On the other hand, there were bloody petechiae of the peritoneum, congestion of internal organs, indicating asphyxiation and the beginning of the decay process.
Moreover, the most damaged parts of the model's body were her buttocks and anus. After the woman's death, Rathbun had sexual intercourse with her. The circumstances of the deaths were almost identical to the two other deaths of the models. They all lived in the vicinity of the photographer.
It was announced at a press conference that Charles E. Rathbun is a long-sought serial killer. The prosecutor managed to prove him only the murder of Sobek, for which he was sent to life imprisonment.
The inspiration for writing the article was the series entitled "Fame kills." You can watch it every Sunday at 22:00 as part of the "Hollywood Crimes" series on CBS Reality.
"Accident and other undefined factors"
Born in 1938, Natasha Nikolaevna Zacharenko, daughter of Russian immigrants, became known as Natalie Wood at the age of nine, Hollywood's rising star . Three Oscar nominations made her a great actress, and the films "Rebel Without a Cause" and "West Side Story" made her immortal.
At the age of 15, she was raped by the great star of the then cinema, Kirk Douglas. The famous actor never answered for his act. After that, it didn't get any better. The press wrote about her marriages and divorces. The last husband of Natalie was Robert Wagner, an actor adored, but bossy and jealous on a daily basis.
Natalie Wood was beautiful and talented. But it did not save her from cruel and premature death (photo:Jack Mitchell, license CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0).
It was with him that Wood spent the last weekend of November 1981 on the yacht "Splendor" near Los Angeles. They were accompanied by the actor Christopher Walken, with whom Natalie was shooting the movie "Brainstorming" at the time.
What happened on the yacht then remains to this day remains one of Hollywood's darkest mysteries . The party together, filled with alcohol, tranquilizers, violence and jealousy, ended with the mysterious death of Wood.
Shortly before midnight, Wagner had a fierce argument with Walken. Natalie's husband suspected she was having an affair with her mate. Soon the actress disappeared from the deck with a lifeboat. Her floating body was found hours later.
Marital idyll? Well, not really. Natalie Wood and Richard Wagner in 1975 (source:public domain).
The death of the actress was considered an accident. Drunken Natalie was supposed to fall into the water while trying to get into the inflatable boat. There were no witnesses because all participants of the event slept in their cabins. The investigation has been closed, doubts remain.
The breakthrough in the case came in 2011, when during a television interview the captain admitted that on that tragic day he lied during the interrogation . He did not say that Wagner and his wife had a fierce argument with his wife after his brawl with Walken.
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When the captain came out to them, the actor was standing alone. All he said was that Natalie was gone. He did not try to look for a wife and also forbade the captain to notify the services of the accident . It took ninety minutes for Wagner to make the first report and concealed the truth.
Thirty years later, the case of Natalie's death caught the attention of investigators again. Actress's grave at Westwood Memorial Park (photo:Taph Madison, license CC BY-SA 4.0).
Los Angeles police immediately resumed their investigation. A new coroner's report found that more than twenty fresh bruises were found on the actress's body on the wrists, face and knees, and scratches on the neck and forehead. This meant Wood had been mugged before drowning.
The contents of her stomach indicated that Natalie had died an hour and a half before being notified of the accident. Based on the urine level tested, it was concluded that the actress was unconscious before she fell into the water .
The captain accused Wagner of the murder, who first changed his side of the story and then stubbornly remained silent. Soon after, the police published an addendum to the autopsy report that finally ruled out the findings of investigators thirty years ago. It changed the cause of death from "accident" to "accident and other unspecified factors."
Lana Wood is not going to rest until justice meets her older sister's murderer. Photo from 1966, taken from the series "Peyton Place" (source:public domain).
Robert Wagner was never indicted. Christopher Walken still claims to have heard and seen nothing . Lana Wood, Natalie's sister, is still fighting for the truth. So far, to no avail…
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Being a movie star is a lifetime dream for many people. The fame, wealth and adoration of the fans are tempting like a fruit of paradise. However, not everyone remembers that there is also the other side of the coin. Dreams of Hollywood sometimes end in tragic death. Fame can immortalize, it can also kill easily…
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"Fame Kills" is the stories of rising stars driven to ruin by dreams of a privileged world of celebrities. Behind the splendor of red carpets, elegant homes and glamorous parties lies the lesser-known dark side of dreamland. Jealousy, greed, unhealthy competition and crime are the other face of Hollywood.