Carl Tanzler: the disgusting necrophile people thought was a sweet romantic
Carl Tanzler couldn’t have been insane; he was a man of science, or at least that’s what he’d have liked you to believe.
He was a respected, worldly older man about town, a radiologist who worked in medicine no less. A Dresden native who had spent time all over the world and then settled in Florida in the US Marine Hospital in Key West. Sure, he had his eccentricities, like his insistence on being called Count Von Cosel by anyone close to him, but who amongst us doesn’t have their funny little quirks?
That said, if people heard the extent of Tanzler’s insanity before they saw it with their own eyes, they’d never have believed it.
Ever since he was a child, Tanzler had been having visions of someone he would later claim to be related to, Countess Anna Constantia Von Cosel. In these visions, the named beauty would reveal the face of his true love to her, an exotic, dark-haired woman that he would meet later in life. These visions would set alarm bells ringing to anyone who heard about them, yet gave Tanzler great comfort. His supposed closeness to the Countess was also the reason why he took on his regal nickname, but that was far from the strangest thing about these visions.
No, the strangest aspect would come in 1930, when Tanzler would come face to face with the woman whom he believed the Countess had been showing him in his visions. A dark-haired, exotic beauty by the name of Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos. There were a few issues with this, though. The first was that she was married to a man called Luis Mesa. Admittedly, he was a scumbag who’d left her when she miscarried their child, but the second was far more pressing: she was about to die of tuberculosis.
The third and final problem was that she absolutely, categorically, did not return his advances. No matter how many times he proclaimed that she was literally the woman of his dreams. No matter how many jewels, dresses, love letters and proposals he showered her with, she didn’t give him the time of day. Probably because he was twice her age and, it cannot be stated enough, she was about to die of tuberculosis.
Finally, despite the best efforts of Tanzler and the hospital, Maria passed away on October 25th, 1931.
Tanzler paid not only for her funeral, but also for an above-ground mausoleum to be installed in her honour. For the next two years, he visited her every evening after work until, according to him, he claimed to hear Elena singing an old song on the wind, which goes like, “He crumbled the marble on the abandoned tomb, dug the earth, and took the rigid skeleton of his beloved in his arms.” For Tanzler, this was Elena’s spirit finally falling for him after death, and he dug up her corpse, then transported it home on a toy wagon.
Of course, Elena’s body continued to decompose. She was, after all, very much dead. Tanzler devoted much of his home life to fighting against her natural state. He replaced her shrunken eyes with glass copies. He filled out the corpse’s decaying body with rags to maintain the form she had in life. As her skin decomposed, he replaced it with silk cloth soaked in wax and plaster of Paris. He doused his home with perfume and disinfectant to cover the smell of the corpse he was cohabiting with, and kept up this charade for seven years.
Finally, the disgusting display was revealed in October 1940, when Elena’s sister, Florinda, cottoned on to disgusting rumours of Tanzler sleeping with her sister’s corpse. She confronted him at his home after hearing that he’d been spotted dancing with Elena’s corpse in front of an open window, discovered her sister’s defiled body and called the police on Tanzler. Somehow, we are not even at the grossest stage of this tale.
The story made headlines all over Florida, and all of them were sympathetic to Tanzler. Public opinion was that Tanzler was an eccentric romantic who just wanted to spend his twilight years with the love of his life. The defiled mockery of Elena’s corpse was even put on display in a local funeral home. Tanzler was even psychiatrically examined after Elena was discovered and was found to be “of sound mind”.
After all, how could he be insane? He was a respected man about town, and above all, doesn’t love make all of us a little crazy?
Just another example of the insane cruelty that white men can get away with scot free, at the expense of a poor woman who can’t even get away from someone obsessed with her in death.