“There is no happiness without tears; no life without death. Beware, I will give you cause to weep.”

- Lucian Staniak - AKA The Red Spider

Cemetery workers charged after allegedly dumping corpses

Four cemetery workers have been charged with illegally dismembering human bodies after digging up more than 300 corpses and dumping them in a pit in order to resell the graves.

Illinois police discovered the decomposing bodies at the historic Burr Oak cemetery in Alsip where a number of prominent African Americans are buried, including Emmett Till, the 14 year-old boy whose lynching in 1955 for flirting with a white woman helped galvanise the civil rights movement, and blues legend Dinah Washington.

"What we found was beyond startling and revolting," the Cook county sheriff, Tom Dart, said.

The police say the bodies were dug up and dumped in an overgrown area fenced off from the rest of the cemetery, 20 miles south of Chicago. The graves were then resold with the four arrested workers believed to have made about $300,000 over several years.

Relatives of the dead descended on the cemetery to discover if their loved ones had been disinterred. They included Simeon Wright, a cousin of Till, who told the Chicago Tribune: "I've got several generations of my family buried there, and I've never had any problems. ... But this is a pretty ghoulish story."

Dart said that Till's grave appears to have been undisturbed but he was not sure about Washington's or that of the heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles.

The principal target appears to have been older graves that had not been visited for many years so that the removal of the bodies would not be noticed by relatives.
Dart said the FBI has been called in and that forensic medical examiners are working to identify the remains.

"I've been in this business for 35 years, and I have never heard of employees committing these kinds of terrible acts," Vickie Hand, treasurer of the Illinois Cemetery & Funeral Home Association, told the Chicago Tribune. "There's no words that can express it; it's just absolutely unbelievable."

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Fritzl jailed for life in dungeon incest case

ST. POELTEN, Austria (CNN) -- A jury in Austria has found Josef Fritzl guilty of raping and imprisoning his daughter for more than two decades and sentenced him to life in prison.

It was the maximum sentence for the most serious charge Fritzl faced: one count of murder, for allowing one of the babies he fathered with his daughter to die shortly after birth.

The eight-member jury returned a unanimous verdict on all counts. Fritzl, dressed in a gray suit, blue shirt and dark tie, stared blankly ahead and showed no emotion as the jury delivered its verdict.

The 73-year-old had pleaded guilty to all charges on Wednesday, but Austrian law requires a jury to return a verdict as well.

Fritzl will soon be moved to a detention facility for mentally abnormal offenders, where psychiatrists will evaluate him and decide on therapy. Until then, he will remain in a two-person cell in St. Poelten.

The man who kept his crimes a secret for 24 years until he was exposed last year made a final, emotional apology to the court Thursday morning.

"I am deeply sorry with all my heart for what I have done, but I cannot go back and change it," Fritzl told the court at St. Poelten, about 70 kilometers (45 miles) east of Amstetten, where he and his family lived.

The jury found Fritzl guilty of incest, rape, enslavement and false imprisonment of his daughter Elisabeth. It also found him guilty of two assault charges and murder in the death of the baby, one of twins, which died 66 hours after birth.

Fritzl initially pleaded not guilty to murder, enslavement, and one of the assault charges, and partly guilty to rape. He surprised his own lawyer by changing his plea Wednesday.

Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser urged the jury Thursday to return a murder conviction. She called Fritzl's admission of guilt a ploy.

"This was not a confession by the accused. It was a change in strategy," she told the court.

Elisabeth Fritzl also wanted her father to be convicted, said her lawyer, Eva Plaz.

Both sides accepted Thursday's verdict and Josef Fritzl refused the option to appeal, court officials said. He could be considered for parole in 15 years, when he would be 88, said court spokesman Franz Cutka, but the Ministry of Justice will decide whether to allow it.

Fritzl's lawyer revealed Thursday that Elisabeth had been in court Tuesday, the second day of the trial. Defense attorney Rudolf Mayer said the elder Fritzl noticed his daughter's presence in the final hour of viewing Elisabeth's videotaped testimony.

Mayer said he was not disappointed with the verdict because it was a "logical consequence" of his client's admission of guilt. He said life in prison is a "very just sentence."

"In my eyes, no man is a monster, regardless of what he's done," Mayer told the BBC. "He's always a human, regardless of what he's done."

A technical expert testified at the trial that the underground chamber in which Fritzl kept his daughter and their offspring had low ceilings -- about 1.7 meters (5.5 feet) high -- and, for the first couple of years, only minimal sanitation. The cellar had no daylight or fresh air.

Prosecutors said Fritzl closeted Elisabeth in the specially designed cellar in 1984, when she was 18, telling other family members that she had run away to join a cult. He kept her there for 24 years, authorities believe, repeatedly sexually assaulting her and fathering her seven children.

Fritzl took three of the children upstairs to live with him and his wife, telling the family that the missing Elisabeth had dropped them off.

Elisabeth and the remaining children never saw daylight, prosecutors said, and Fritzl went away for long periods, leaving them without food. To punish them, prosecutors said, Fritzl sometimes turned off the power in the cellar for up to 10 days.

In addition, they alleged, Elisabeth was often sexually assaulted in front of the children.

One of the babies -- a boy named Michael -- died shortly after birth. Prosecutors charged Fritzl with murder in his death because he did not receive medical care.

Fritzl admitted Wednesday that he was in the cellar when the baby was born. He noticed the child was breathing heavily, he said, but he did not think the baby would die and decided not to seek help.

Fritzl told the court he was probably responsible for the child's death and pleaded guilty to his murder. He had earlier pleaded not guilty to the charge but said he changed his mind after hearing Elisabeth's videotaped testimony.

The prosecution said Thursday that Michael struggled for 66 hours before dying of respiratory problems. They said Fritzl knew what was happening but was indifferent.

Authorities have said that Elisabeth and her children now have new identities and are in a secret location. Asked at a news conference why other family members have not testified, officials said they did not wish to.

The case came to light in April 2008, when Elisabeth's then-19-year-old daughter, Kerstin, became seriously ill and ended up in the hospital. Hospital staff became suspicious and alerted police, who then discovered the family's plight in the cellar.



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Fritzl facing 3,000 rape charges

by John Dunne

Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who committed incest and locked up members of his family in a dungeon, is to face up to 3,000 rape charges at his three-day trial, it was ­revealed today.

Senior legal sources have revealed that he has admitted having sex with his daughter Elisabeth “two or three times a week” during the 24 years he kept her locked in a basement prison.

Fritzl, 74, could face a court as early as December under the ­Austrian legal system. Last week state prosecutors announced Fritzl’s trial would be heard in private, apart from opening formalities and sentencing. They expect to officially file formal charges by the end of October. Austrian newspaper Kurier said court officials believed it might be impossible to find enough jurors who have not already made up their minds about Fritzl’s guilt.

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Feds cuff blogger for Guns N' Roses leak

The FBI has arrested a 27-year-old American blogger for leaking some unreleased Guns N' Roses tunes to the internet.

According to The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times, the Feds cuffed Culver City, California's Kevin Cogill on Wednesday morning, two months after his web site Antiquiet served up nine tunes from "Chinese Democracy" - an album Axl Rose and various other people have been dawdling over for more than a decade.
In an arrest affidavit, Cogill admitted to streaming the tunes, and the Feds have accused him of violating US copyright law.

Yes, the tunes have since been removed from Cogill's site. But plenty of people have already done their listening/copying. The affidavit also says that Antiquiet received so much traffic when the songs were posted, it eventually crashed.

Clearly, an online "Chinese Democracy" leak poses a serious threat to Guns N' Roses and its label, Geffen Records. If web surfers actually hear the unreleased album, the mix n' match band can no longer maintain the illusion that it isn't complete shite.

Dungeon monster Fritzl trial in private

By ALEX PEAKE

DUNGEON incest monster Josef Fritzl’s trial will be held behind closed doors, a court official revealed yesterday.
The public and press will “quite certainly” be excluded to protect his victims in Sankt Poelten, Austria, he said.

It means the full story of how Fritzl kept daughter Elisabeth caged as a sex slave for 24 years may never be known.

Elisabeth, 42, had seven children by her evil father, 74.


Three were taken to live upstairs with Fritzl and wife Rosemarie, 69.

The others — Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix, five — were held in the cellar with their mum at the home in Amstetten.

Most evidence will be from Elisabeth on video.

It is not known if the cellar children will testify, when the trial will start or the charges.

The public will be allowed in only for the formal start — set to last three days — and after the verdicts.

One Austrian legal expert said: “The authorities want to protect Elisabeth and her children and stop the trial from becoming some sort of ghoulish daily freak show.

Interesting Times Revisited

On this date in 1895, American frontier murderer and outlaw, John Wesley Hardin, is killed by an off-duty policeman in a saloon in El Paso, Texas.

A Cozy Basement for 5

A shocking image of Elisabeth Fritzl – the 42-year-old victim of Austria's worst recorded case of multiple rape and incest – was published yesterday. It shows an elderly looking woman with crudely cut hair that has turned completely grey. She has a deeply-lined face and tight lips which, doctors say, conceal a mouth full of badly decaying teeth. The drawing, published by the Austrian media, is said to be an "accurate artist's impression" of Elisabeth, based on interviews with doctors and police who have been caring for her since she escaped from the underground cell in which she was held captive for 24 years.


Elisabeth has not been seen in public since she was imprisoned in a windowless bunker beneath her father Josef's garden in 1984 and forced to become his sex slave. Fritzl, 73, who was arrested after apparently confessing to his crimes at the weekend, is in custody pending his trial.

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