This entry exists to correct a misclassification. Carl Tanzler killed no one, was never accused of killing anyone, and is not a serial killer by any definition. He appears on lists of them constantly, and the reason is that what he did do is genuinely macabre.
He was born Georg Karl Tanzler in Dresden on February 8, 1877, served in a British internment camp in Australia during the First World War, and emigrated by way of Cuba to Key West in 1926, leaving a wife and children in Zephyrhills. He worked as a radiologic technologist at the United States Marine Hospital and told people he was a count with nine university degrees, most of which he did not have. He styled himself Count Carl von Cosel, a title he had no claim to, which is of a piece with the rest of the invention.
In April 1930 he examined a twenty-one-year-old Cuban-American patient, Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos, who had tuberculosis. He became fixated on her, treating her at her family's home with X-rays and his own concoctions and bringing her gifts and jewellery. She died in October 1931. He paid for a mausoleum and visited it nightly.
In April 1933 he took her body out of the tomb, moved it to a shack, and then home. He held it together with wire coat hangers, replaced the decayed tissue with plaster and wax soaked in cloth, fitted glass eyes, made a wig from her own hair, and dressed it, and kept it in his bed for seven years, wearing perfume and disinfectant to cover the smell.
Her sister heard rumours in October 1940 and confronted him, and the body was found. He was arrested and charged with wantonly and maliciously destroying a grave and removing a body without authorisation. The statute of limitations had expired and the case was dropped. Public sympathy in Key West was, remarkably, largely on his side, and some six thousand people queued to view the reconstructed body at the funeral home. He died at Pasadena, Florida, on July 3, 1952.