2 cases tagged “occult crime”
Accused: Enriqueta Martí Ripollés
On the morning of February 10, 1912, Barcelona police broke down the door of a ground-floor apartment on Carrer de Ponent and found something that would haunt the city for generations. Behind a locked interior door sat roughly fifty jars and basins arranged with terrible precision: congealed human blood, rendered fat, hand skeletons, bone dust, and small glass vials of finished elixirs, each one labeled in elegant calligraphy. Cowering in the front room were two children, one of them a five-year-old girl named Teresita who had been missing from the streets of El Raval for only days. The apartment's tenant was a woman named Enriqueta Martí Ripollés. By day, neighbors knew her as a ragged beggar who shuffled through Barcelona's poorest quarters with a child at her side. By night, she was something else entirely: wigged, jeweled, and dressed in silk, moving through the parlors of the city's wealthiest families and selling them preparations she claimed could cure tuberculosis, reverse aging, and treat venereal disease. Preparations made, authorities alleged, from the bodies of the city's most vulnerable children. She became known across Spain as "The Vampire of Barcelona." She was never convicted. She never stood trial. And the full truth of what happened inside that locked room may have been buried, deliberately and permanently, by the very people she served.
Convicted: Tracey Avril Wigginton
The police found her bank card tucked inside the dead man's shoe. His clothes had been folded neatly nearby, as though someone had taken great care with them, though no such care had been taken with Edward Baldock himself. He lay on the grass at Orleigh Park, stabbed twenty-seven times, his head nearly severed from his body. It was October 1989, and Brisbane was about to reckon with one of the most disturbing murders in its history. The woman whose card was found in that shoe was Tracey Wigginton, a 24-year-old who stood six feet tall and moved through the city's occult underground with quiet intensity. She had, by her own account and the accounts of her associates, been working toward this night for some time. She wanted to drink a human being's blood. When police caught up with her, she told them she had felt nothing while stabbing Baldock, that she had sat down afterward to smoke a cigarette and watched him die. At sentencing, she faced the cameras and said: "It's hard to be famous, isn't it? A legend in my own mind." This is the story of Tracey Wigginton: a troubled child from Rockhampton who became the most notorious female killer in modern Australian history, and the questions her case still provokes today about justice, rehabilitation, and the darkness that can take root inside a human being.
