Free The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases by John Marlowe

two of Kiss’s victims, Julianne Paschek and Elizabeth Komeromi, had initiated separate court actions after he had taken their money under false pretences. The bodies of both complainants were found buried close to his home.
    On 4 October 1916, as Nagy’s investigation was set to enter the third month, the detective received word from a Serbian hospital that in 1915 Kiss had succumbed to typhoid. Shortly after, a second message arrived from Serbia, stating that Kiss was alive, recuperating in the very same institution. Nagy travelled immediately to the hospital, arriving to find a corpse in Kiss’s bed – the body of a dead soldier who was quite obviously not the murderer. Nagy was certain that Kiss had somehow been tipped off and had hoped to throw off the police by placing a dead man in his bed.
    While the tinsmith may not have been successful in fooling the chief detective of Budapest, his escape was effective. The trail was cold, and was warmed only occasionally by rumour and speculation. In 1919, he was supposedly spotted in Budapest. The following year, it was reported that he was serving under the alias ‘Hoffman’ in the French Foreign Legion.
    One unconfirmed report was that he was in a Romanian prison, serving time on a charge of burglary; another had it that Kiss had died in Turkey of yellow fever.
    The most intriguing of all these sightings occurred in 1932 when a New York Police Department homicide detective named Henry Oswald thought he saw Kiss exiting the Times Square subway station. Known as ‘Camera Eye’, owing to his flawless memory for faces, Oswald followed the man he thought was Kiss, but lost him in the crowd. He never saw the man again.
    THE AXEMAN OF NEW ORLEANS
    On the evening of 19 March 1919, residents of New Orleans sat in bars and restaurants, listening to live bands, confident that the music being played, jazz, was protecting them from violent murder. It was just one of many evenings made bizarre by the Axeman of New Orleans, a serial killer who, literally and figuratively, struck randomly in Louisiana’s largest city in the early part of the 20th century.
    The mystery of the Axeman of New Orleans begins in two modest flats that once stood at the back of a grocery store at the corner of Upperline and Magnolia streets. In one flat lived Andrew Maggio, a barber, and his brother Jake. The other served as home to a third brother, Joseph, and Catherine, his wife. It was, in fact, Joseph and Catherine’s grocery store and bar that separated the flats from the street. In the early hours of 23 May 1918, Jake was awoken by a sound, a sort of groaning, coming from Joseph and Catherine’s apartment. At first, he tried to get the couple’s attention by knocking on the wall. There was no response. He woke Andrew and together the two brothers went over to the adjacent flat.
    They immediately came upon the sign of a break-in: a wooden panel that had been chiselled out of the kitchen door. Entering the apartment by the same point as the intruder, the pair rushed to the bedroom. There, they came upon Catherine. Lying across the bed, her skull was caved in, and her throat was so deeply cut that she was very nearly decapitated. Beneath their sister-in-law, bathed in her blood, lay their brother Joseph. He, too, had been attacked. His head was cut open in several places, yet the grocer was still alive. When he saw his brothers, Joseph attempted to stand, but found he could not. He died before an ambulance could be summoned.
    After the authorities arrived, a pile of men’s clothing was discovered on the bathroom floor. A bloody straight razor and an axe were also discovered. The coroner had no doubt that both had been used in killing the couple. The motive for the crime was less clear. Although the Maggios’ safe was found to be open and empty, money placed in other locations in the flat, including a sum discovered beneath Joseph’s pillow, was left behind.
    The horrific scene ensured that the murders