On April 22, 1930 a young woman named Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos was brought by her mother to the United States Marine Hospital in Key West for an examination. The X-ray technician who saw her was a German of fifty-three who called himself Count Carl von Cosel. He decided on the spot that she was the dark-haired woman he said had been shown to him in visions since childhood.
She was twenty, born on July 31, 1909, a daughter of Francisco Hoyos, known as Pancho, a cigar maker, and Aurora Milagro. She had two sisters, Florinda, called Nana, and Celia. In 1926 she had married Luis Mesa, and the marriage had not lasted. She had tuberculosis, the disease that would kill most of her family within a few years.
The technician was born Georg Karl Tänzler in Dresden on February 8, 1877. He had been interned in Australia during the First World War, reached Key West in 1926 by way of Cuba, and left a wife and daughters in Zephyrhills, Florida. He claimed a noble title and nine university degrees he did not have. He treated Elena at her family's home with X-rays and remedies of his own and brought her presents. She died on October 25, 1931. He paid for a mausoleum in the Key West Cemetery and visited it night after night.
In April 1933 he took her body from the mausoleum, carried it through the cemetery after dark, and moved it to his home. Over the next seven years he held it together with wire and coat hangers, replaced the decaying skin with layers of wax and silk soaked in plaster, set glass eyes into the face, made a wig from her own hair, dressed it and kept it in his bed, using perfume and disinfectant to hide the smell.
In October 1940 Florinda heard rumors that he was living with a life-size doll that looked like her sister, went to his house and found the body. He was arrested. At a preliminary hearing at the Monroe County Courthouse on October 9, 1940 he was held to answer on a charge of wantonly and maliciously destroying a grave and removing a body without authorization. The two-year statute of limitations for the offense had run long before, and the case was dropped.
Physicians and pathologists examined the body, and it was put on view at the Dean-Lopez Funeral Home, where as many as 6,800 people filed past it. It was then buried in an unmarked grave in the Key West Cemetery, in a place kept secret to prevent further tampering. Public feeling in Key West ran more toward fascination than outrage, and much of the press treated the story as a romance. In 1972 two doctors who said they had attended the 1940 examination, DePoo and Foraker, claimed they had found evidence of necrophilia. Nothing of the kind was presented at the hearing or appears in the photographs of the time, and the claim remains disputed.
He moved to Pasadena, Florida, near his family, and made a life-size effigy of Elena from a death mask, which he kept with him. He was found dead on July 3, 1952, and was buried beside his daughter Crystal, who had died in her teens; his wife, Doris, then a nurse in Huntington Woods, Michigan, did not attend. Some accounts give the date of death as July 23. He killed no one and was never accused of killing anyone.