Topic of the Week: Necrophilia

Disclaimer: Some topics discussed in the following post may be graphic or difficult for some to read. Discretion is advised. Information provided in this post is based on personal research and some of it is my personal opinion about events that have transpired in relation to the topic at hand.

Average number of cups of coffee required to stay awake per day this week: 3

Necrophilia is a gross subject matter, plain and simple. If you have never heard this term before - congratulations, you haven’t had to think about it and therefore your mind is probably a much nicer place to be than mine. Fear not, dear reader, I shall explain what it is so you can join me in the horror show constantly going on in my head.

By definition, necrophilia is the sexual intercourse with or sexual attraction to a corpse. The word, broken down is necro, originally nekros, meaning “corpse” or “dead” in Ancient Greek, and philia, also Ancient Greek, meaning “affection.” The definition basically sums it up, though there are actually ten different tiers of necrophilia that people can be classified as. Below, I've listed them and given a brief description of each. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to do in depth research for each and find a unique case for each of the ten tiers, but I hope the cases I have found will interest you.

1. Role Players: People who get aroused by pretending their live partner is dead during sexual activity.
2. Romantic Necrophiliacs: Bereaved people who remain attached to their loved ones' bodies.
3. Necrophilic Fantasizers: People who fantasize about necrophilia but never actually do any kind of sexual activity with a corpse.
4. Tactile Necrophiliacs: People who are aroused by touching or stroking a corpse without engaging in intercourse.
5. Fetishistic Necrophiliacs: People who remove items or body parts from a corpse for sexual purposes without engaging in intercourse.
6. Necromutilomaniacs: People who derive pleasure from mutilating a corpse while masturbating, without engaging in intercourse.
7. Opportunistic Necrophiliacs: People who normally have no interest in necrophilia, but take the opportunity when it arises.
8. Regular Necrophiliacs: People who preferentially have intercourse with the dead.
9. Homicidal Necrophiliacs: People who commit murder in order to have sex with the deceased victim.
10. Exclusive Necrophiliacs: People who have an exclusive interest in sex with the dead, and cannot perform at all for living partners.

Now, the legality of necrophilia was really difficult to find information on, for some reason. You would think I wouldn't be the first person wondering if having sex with a corpse was legal in your state or not. And because there are so many different tiers of necrophilia and the different levels of what the individual states (because yes, this seems to be a state's jurisdiction in terms of whether or not it's illegal) view as wrong, it was just generally hard to find information. Just about the only information I've found is as follows:

• Anal and oral sex with a corpse is illegal in Louisiana and North Carolina, but any other sexual act is not.
• In Kansas and Kentucky, only heterosexual necrophilic oral sex is legal.
• New Mexico, Vermont, and Nebraska have no laws prohibiting necrophilia.

I really wish there was more information about the legality of all of this, but unfortunately, my research only took me so far into it. If I can get my hands on more information about it later on, I'll come back and add to this. For now, let's continue with a couple of cases involving necrophiles.

Karen Greenlee
Greenlee's case is described as one of the most notable cases of modern necrophilia. She was an apprentice embalmer at the Memorial Lawn Mortuary in Sacramento, California when she stole a hearse with the body of a 33-year old man in it in December of 1979. When she was found not too long after the hearse went missing, she had overdosed on codeine Tylenol. Physicians managed to pump her stomach and save her life. With her belongings when she was found, there was a four and a half long confession letter of everything she had done to 20-40 male corpses in the time she had been around dead bodies. She called her sexual relations with these men "an addiction," at the time. As there were no laws against necrophilia at the time in California, she was only tried and convicted of stealing the hearse and disrupting a funeral. She was sentenced to 11 days in jail and a $255 fine. She also ended up being sued for emotional damages by the mother of the man whose body was in the hearse she stole.

In 1987, Greenlee gave an interview to Jim Morton, author of Apocalypse Culture. Here's an excerpt:

The question I am most often asked is, "How does she do it?"

Yes, that's the question! People ask questions like that-- even people who seem pretty cool, seem to have open minds-- then when you tell them, they say, "That's very interesting," then don't want to have much to do with me. I don't mind telling people how I do it. It doesn't matter to me, but anyone adept sexually shouldn't have to ask. People have this misconception that there has to be penetration for sexual gratification, which is bull! The most sensitive part of a woman is the front area anyway and that is what needs to be stimulated.

Besides, there are different aspects of sexual expression: touchy-feely, 69, even holding hands. That body is just lying there, but it has what it takes to make me happy. The cold, the aura of death, the smell of death, the funereal surroundings, it all contributes.

The smell of death?

Sure, I find the odor of death very erotic. There are death odors and there are death odors. Now you get your body that's been floating in the bay for two weeks, or a burn victim, that doesn't attract me much, but a freshly embalmed corpse is something else.

There is also this attraction to blood. When you're on top of a body it tends to purge blood out of its mouth, while you're making passionate love .. You'd have to be there, I guess.

Check out the full interview transcript here.

Carl Tanzler
Tanzler was a German man who emigrated to the US in the early 20th century and became a radiology technician. He married Doris Shafer in 1920 and had two children with her, though I don't know why this is important because I found nothing about her until after everything about his crimes came to light. Another somewhat unimportant fact is that he signed several of his hospital records as "Count Carl Tanzler von Cosel." To continue: during his childhood, he claimed to have visions of his ancestor, Countess Anna Constania von Cosel. He described her as a dark haired beauty, one he would later meet and claim to be the woman from his visions. While he was working at the Marine Hospital in Key West in 1930, he met Maria Elena "Helen" Milagro de Hoyos, a local Cuban-American woman somewhat renowned locally for her beauty. She died soon after they met from tuberculosis, despite Tanzler doing everything he could to save her life (even though he was just a radiology technician). With the permission of her family, he planned her funeral and had a large aboveground mausoleum built for her. Over the next two years, he would visit her almost every night, singing a Spanish song to her corpse, and spending quite a bit of time with her body. In April 1933, he stole her body from the mausoleum. By this point, her body had decomposed quite a big, but he put her body back together using wire, coat hangers, wax, plaster of paris, and silk, topping off his "masterpiece" with glass eyes and a wig made from Hoyos's own her that her mother had given him shortly after the funeral. He filled her chest cavity with rags to prevent it from caving in and used a ton of perfume, disinfectants, and preserving agents to mask the scent of decomposition. In 1940 (yes, 1940, seven years after he stole her body and nine years after she died), Hoyos's sister heard rumors that he had Hoyos's body in his bed and confronted him. The police were called and discovered the body in his bed. He was charged with "wantonly and maliciously destroying a grave and removing a body without authorization" but the statue of limitations had expired by that point and he could not be convicted. His wife supposedly supported him through all of the trial processes, even though I have absolutely no idea where she was when there was a nine year old corpse in her husband's bed.
Now to the necrophilia aspect of it: two physicians (names included because while one doctor was named Dr. Foraker which is pretty normal, the other doctor's name was Dr. DePoo and I couldn't stop laughing. I'm sorry, Dr. DePoo) found that a paper tube had been inserted into her vaginal area to allow for intercourse.

I feel like the classifications of these two under the ten types of necrophilia is fairly obvious, but I'd love to hear opinions on what my readers (all four of you) think in the comments below.

Fun Fact: The opposite of necrophilia is necrophobia, which is the fear of corpses.

In other news, I'm well into my semester at school - in fact, I'm two weeks from Spring Break. Very excited, because I'll hopefully get to catch up on sleep. I'm sorry that I took so long to upload this post, I'm going to try to keep it on a weekly schedule as best I can. Honestly, I'm surprised I even managed to get a second post up, because I'm horrible at blogging and this is my attempt to get better. I've already started researching the next blog topic (which may be a bit off-topic since it's not technically a crime, but I can tie it to one). We'll see what y'all think.

That's it for this week, dear reader. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, leave a comment or shoot me an email at truecrimeandcoffee@gmail.com. Thanks for the read, I know that necrophilia is not particularly enjoyable, but hopefully you learned something interesting. I will see y'all next week!
-Jess