Every famous case collects a second file, and the second file is usually better written than the first. It has a nickname, a cellar, a number and a last line spoken on the gallows. The first file has a court record, which is slower, vaguer and often contradicted by the second. The eight cases here are chosen because the false version outran the true one by a century or more, and because in each the point at which the story departs from the record can still be located. Some of the myths came out of a Jesuit’s sermon-like history or a pulp magazine. One came from a teenage boy talking to police, and several from newspapers in their first sensational week. A few were not invented at all, only carried further than anyone checked.
Elizabeth Báthory was a Hungarian countess from one of the most powerful families in the kingdom. In 1610, when she was a widow managing large estates, a royal investigation took statements from hundreds of witnesses about girls and young women said to have died in her household. On December 29, 1610, the men of the palatine, György Thurzó, seized her at her manor house in Čachtice, in what is now western Slovakia. Her servants were tried at Bytča in January 1611, and several were executed. She was never charged and never tried. She lived under guard at Čachtice Castle until she died there on August 21, 1614.
The story that made her famous is that she bathed in the blood of girls to keep her youth. It is not in the evidence of 1610 and 1611. The historian Gábor Várkonyi writes that a coherent legend took shape only in the eighteenth century. Its first printed source, according to Várkonyi and the Hungarian scholar Tünde Lengyel, is a history of Hungary and its kings by the Jesuit László Turóczi, published in 1729. Turóczi tells how a maid’s blood fell on the countess’s skin, which seemed to grow younger, and how she then turned to bathing in the blood of girls. Várkonyi reads that passage as a moral parable about a noblewoman who abandoned the true faith and fell to the devil. National Geographic, quoting Tony Thorne of King’s College London, dates the book to 1744 instead and says the enduring legend rests largely on it.
From there the story passed from book to book. Later writers repeated it, and in 1908 came Dezső Rexa’s study, which Lengyel calls the most influential source of the horror story. In 1932 the Slovak writer Jožo Nižnánsky serialized a novel in a newspaper; Lengyel writes that it has sold more than two million copies with its translations, and The Slovak Spectator credited Nižnánsky with first calling her "the blood countess." Historians on both sides of the argument now reject the baths. Even Dvořák, who regards the evidence of killings as strong, told the Spectator that bathing in blood is a figment of the imagination. Guinness World Records, revisiting its own listing in 2023, said there is no real evidence that she drank or bathed in blood.
What the record does contain is thinner than the legend and harder to read. Investigators took statements from 327 witnesses, Várkonyi writes. Of those, 220 had seen or heard nothing relevant. Of the 107 who had heard something, 43 gave statements that did not support the accusation. The remaining 64 said they had heard of killings, but none was an eyewitness, and the numbers they gave ran from a handful to "innumerable" to 650. Almost every substantial claim, Várkonyi argues, can be traced to about ten people. The State Archive in Prešov summarizes the testimony as claiming that she killed between 2 and 650 girls and young women between 1585 and 1610. No court ever made a finding on any number.
None of this proves her innocent. The investigation and the servants' executions are documented. Whether she was responsible for the deaths alleged, and for how many, is still disputed between historians who see a real pattern of mistreatment behind the testimony and those who see a case built on rumor for political and financial ends. Lengyel and Várkonyi side with that view; Lengyel describes her as a victim of Thurzó, whose estates bordered hers and who wanted her land. The blood baths are the one part of the story that nobody in the argument defends.
Lavinia Fisher was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 18, 1820, beside her husband, John Fisher. A Charleston court had convicted the couple of highway robbery in May 1819. In South Carolina at that time robbery on the highway could be punished by death, and it was this conviction, not any finding about a killing, that sent them to the gallows. The robbery the court relied on was an assault on a trader who had stopped to water his horse. The couple had kept the Six Mile House, a boarding house north of Charleston, and had been arrested on February 18, 1819, after a sheriff and a mob raided it. Earlier they had been indicted for assault with intent to murder; the charge was later changed to highway robbery. No court charged either of them with murder.
The legend is a different case. In the form told today, Lavinia lured travelers, asked about their business to learn who carried money, and the couple robbed and killed them. Some tellings add hidden devices in the house. The Post and Courier reports that later versions raised the count of victims to 20 or 30. A tour guide quoted by WCIV in 2022 presents these details as legend, and Bruce Orr, whose book Six Miles to Charleston took three years to write, told the Post and Courier that the record contains none of the devices and none of the hidden victims the legend describes. He called the story fabrication and fiction. The first printed version appeared years after the hanging.
The hanging has its own myths, and they show how a story picks up decoration. One is that a married woman could not be executed in South Carolina, so John was hanged first to make her a widow; the guide who told it to WCIV presented it as legend, and the record as the Post and Courier describes it has the couple hanged together. Another is that Lavinia asked to be hanged in her wedding dress, in the hope that someone in the crowd would marry her on the spot. Nic Butler, a historian at the Charleston County Public Library, told the paper that this is unlikely and that she more probably wore the white shift that prisoners at the jail wore. A third is the final speech, in which Lavinia tells the crowd that anyone with a message for hell should give it to her, because she will carry it. Versions appear in the Post and Courier, which gives it as attributed by legend, and in a 2015 ABC News 4 report. No contemporary source for the line has been identified.
Orr goes further than debunking. He concluded that the Fishers were probably not killers at all and were unjustly convicted by corrupt politicians, and he suggests the executions may have been tied to a government effort to take land for a naval base at Charleston. That is Orr’s interpretation. It has not been tested in other reporting, and the robbery conviction was never overturned. Meanwhile the older story has become a business. Visitors on ghost tours of the old city jail have reported a figure in white in the halls, WCIV reported, and Charleston Magazine in 2025 described her in its own voice as considered the first female serial killer in the United States. The sentence that the court passed was for robbery.
Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself H. H. Holmes, was convicted of one murder. A Philadelphia jury convicted him in November 1895 of killing Benjamin F. Pitezel, a carpenter who had worked for him for years and joined him in a scheme to cheat a life insurance company. Holmes was hanged at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896. Investigators attributed to him the deaths of three of Pitezel’s children, in Indianapolis and Toronto in 1894, but he was never tried for them, and the trial judge excluded that evidence. Chicago police also suspected him over the 1891 to 1893 disappearances of several women, among them Julia Conner and her daughter Pearl, Emeline Cigrand and the sisters Minnie and Nannie Williams. He was never charged in those cases.
The Murder Castle, the Englewood building in which Holmes was said to have killed dozens of people, comes from newspaper reports of July and August 1895, when Chicago police and reporters took over the place. The claims rose and fell from one edition to the next, and several were later disproved. The building itself never produced a court case.
His confession is the other source. Several of the people he named were alive, and on the gallows he denied killing any of the Pitezels. Later claims of 100 or 200 victims or more have no support in the record. Adam Selzer, whose 2017 book set out to separate the record from the legend, calls the popular version "a new American tall tale."
How did a swindler become a ghoul? Before 2003, Holmes appeared mostly in pulp thrillers of the 1940s and in a 1974 novel by the author of Psycho, PhillyVoice noted in 2017. Then Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, published in 2003, set his story beside the building of the 1893 fair and made it a best seller. Larson’s own endnotes acknowledge that some of his Holmes scenes are speculative, Smithsonian has noted, and Selzer has called the book closer to a novel than to nonfiction in its Holmes chapters.
The most vivid myth of the lot was tested in the ground. For more than a century a rumor held that Holmes had bribed his way out of the execution and that another man had been hanged in his place. In late 2016 members of his family petitioned the Delaware County Court to open his plot at the cemetery in Yeadon, citing family lore that he had escaped "through some subterfuge." A judge approved the request early in 2017, and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, which owns the cemetery, also had to agree. The dig was arranged with the History channel, which filmed it for the series American Ripper, and with Jeff Mudgett, Holmes’s great-great-grandson, who had long suspected that Holmes escaped to England and became Jack the Ripper. Janet Monge and Samantha Cox of the University of Pennsylvania led the excavation, which began on May 6, 2017, and took about ten days. Cemetery records said the plot was ten feet deep and filled with concrete. The first coffin, at about six feet, was empty; its concrete had never set. Beneath it was a second container marked "Mudgett" and "H.H. Holmes," and tests confirmed that the man inside was Holmes. The man who was supposed to have escaped to London had been in the cemetery since 1896.
Earle Nelson was hanged in Winnipeg on January 13, 1928, for the murder of Emily Patterson, 27. That conviction is the only one in his record. Yet by the time the rope was ready, police in the United States and Canada had linked him to a long series of deaths of women that began in San Francisco in February 1926 and ran east across the continent to Manitoba. The Canadian Press, looking back in 1967, wrote that police in both countries closed the files on 22 murder cases when he died. Most of the dead were women who rented out rooms or showed houses to prospective tenants or buyers. No court ever heard evidence about the San Francisco deaths. They are attributed to him by police and by later historians, not by any verdict, and the totals do not agree: 22 closed cases in 1967; 24 American deaths plus two in Winnipeg in the Winnipeg Police Museum’s count; at least 21 women and a baby, possibly more than 30, in a 2013 newspaper feature by Finn J.D. John; up to 34 possible victims in the account of the retired law professor Alvin Esau. He never confessed.
The familiar biography supplies a motive. Nelson, the accounts say, was raised by a fanatically religious grandmother who drilled him in scripture, and the warped piety explains the rest. The story appears in popular writing, including the San Francisco Examiner’s 2015 feature by Paul Drexler and John’s account. Esau, who obtained the Manitoba Attorney General’s files on the case through a freedom of information request and later worked through Winnipeg police files and American archives, has said that Nelson was indeed very interested in religion and often quoted the Bible. But he told the University of Manitoba’s news service in 2022 that there is no evidence for the familiar stories about a fanatically religious upbringing, and he called such accounts myths endlessly repeated in the literature. Esau and other recent writers agree on one disputed point that does hold: Nelson had escaped from a California mental institution.
In the 1920s the Czechoslovak press turned Martin Lecián into a celebrity. Between May 1925 and April 1927 he committed at least 72 proven thefts in Moravia, according to Czech Radio’s 2018 history of the case, and in the early months of 1927 he fired on the watchmen, gendarmes and police officers who tried to stop him. One gendarme, a sergeant named Stuchlý, died on March 8, 1927. Newspapers followed every step of the hunt, songs were written about him, and parts of the public came to see him as a Robin Hood or a Jánošík, the highwayman of Slovak legend. Czech Radio puts the other view bluntly: he was a common thief who robbed anyone and shot without a second thought.
He was arrested at Nový Bohumín on April 24, 1927. A military court at Olomouc sentenced him to death by hanging, and Novinky.cz reported in 2018 that he was convicted of 75 thefts and robberies and of three murders. Blesk puts the number of killings at four. In September, while he waited for the president’s answer to his plea for clemency, he and a fellow prisoner tried to break out of the divisional prison at Olomouc, and a 22-year-old guard, Ferencz Kiss, was killed. The president refused clemency, and Lecián was hanged at Olomouc in October 1927, the last man executed by the state executioner Leopold Wohlschläger.
The people he killed were mostly men who stood in his way: watchmen, a gendarme, a conscript on guard duty in a military prison. That is the part of the legend that does not survive a list. A colloquium of Czech, Moravian and Slovak bibliographers at the Moravian Library in Brno heard a paper on him in October 2017, "Martin Lecián, lupičská legenda Moravy," by Anna Vitásková. Its published abstract says the press of the day largely romanticized him, and that his relationship with a woman who was his partner in crime made the two a Czech counterpart of Bonnie and Clyde. Czech Radio’s title for its 2018 program asks whether he was an Arsène Lupin, a Fantomas or a Jánošík, and says that he made his way into the prose of Bohumil Hrabal. Literature kept him. The sergeant and the guard did not get a song.
Joe Ball ran a tavern in Elmendorf, a small town in southeastern Bexar County, Texas, in the 1930s. Behind it he kept alligators in a concrete pool. On September 24, 1938, two Bexar County deputies, John Gray and John Klevenhagen, told him they were taking him to San Antonio to answer questions about women who had gone missing. He killed himself in front of them. He was never charged with any crime.
Everything else in the story is less certain. The San Antonio papers wrote of more than a dozen missing barmaids. Pulp magazines, books and later websites added more, and the count credited to Ball has run from five to twenty-five or more. The best known claim, that he fed women to his alligators, was never established. Deputies drained the pool and recovered no human material, and Elton Cude Sr., a deputy who worked the case, said in a 1988 interview that he did not believe the alligators had eaten a human body of any kind. The writer Michael Hall, who went to Elmendorf for Texas Monthly in 2002, set out to separate the record from the legend.
The record rests on two women and one witness. Minnie Gotthardt, who ran Ball’s bar, vanished in the summer of 1937, and Hazel Brown, 22, called "Schatzie," in 1938. Ball’s handyman, Clifton Wheeler, gave deputies an account of both deaths. By his statements, Ball killed each woman, and Wheeler was made to help conceal Brown’s body. Gotthardt’s body was recovered at Ingleside on October 14, 1938. No court ruled on either death, because Ball was dead before he could be charged, and Wheeler received two years in jail as an accessory. Ball’s widow said in an interview in 1957 that there had been only two murders and that Ball had never put anyone in the tank. Wheeler’s account to deputies, as Texas Monthly reports it, described what happened to the bodies without mentioning the pool. KSAT’s 2021 report says that Wheeler claimed Ball fed some of his victims to the alligators and that no evidence supported the claim; Texas Monthly’s fuller account of his statements does not contain it. Either way, the pool was drained in 1938.
Where did the rest come from? Texas Monthly traces the larger story to True Detective and other pulp magazines, which covered the case and embellished it, then to books such as The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers and America’s Most Vicious Criminals, and later to websites. Some of these accounts added victims whose names appear in no record of the time. Ball’s sister sued True Detective several times. The nicknames came with the stories: the "Bluebeard of Texas," the "Butcher of Elmendorf," the "Alligator Man." A rumor that Ball’s wife lost her arm to the alligators was false: she lost it after a car accident in January 1938, and she was alive in San Diego when deputies traced her there.
Enriqueta Martí was arrested in Barcelona on February 27, 1912, after a five-year-old girl who had been missing since February 10 turned up alive in her keeping in the Raval district. Within days the city’s newspapers had made her the "vampira del Raval," a woman said to have abducted and killed children and sold remedies made from their bodies to rich clients. She died in the Reina Amalia women’s prison on May 12, 1913, without being tried on those accusations. More than a century later, the writers and historians who went back to the newspapers and court files of 1912 concluded that the murders had never been shown, and that the case said more about Barcelona than about her. Catalan broadcaster 3Cat has called the vampire of the Raval one of the first fake news stories in history.
By early 1912, rumors that children were being taken in the city were widespread. After the search of her lodgings and of places where she had lived before, Muy Interesante writes, police concluded from what they seized that she had made healing ointments and potions from children’s bodies. 3Cat reports that the press described physical evidence and a list of names of upper-class people. The record, as reported by the historians and broadcasters who have examined the case, supports less. The girl turned up alive in Martí's keeping on February 27, 1912, and Martí was arrested and held for trial. A second, younger girl in her care was most likely her niece. The material seized was mostly animal, with human material from one adult, and the blood is explained by her illness. No child victim was identified in any of the reporting, and no body of a child was produced.
Two researchers did most to take the legend apart, each publishing a book in 2014. Jordi Corominas, a Barcelona journalist born in 1979, had first presented the vampire story as true in earlier work on famous crimes. He began to doubt it around 2010, elDiario.es reports, and went back to the newspaper archives, finding that the myth rested on the first sensational reports and that no one had followed the later course of the case. He argued that the city seemed to want a killer of its own, a local Jack the Ripper, when its real crimes of the period turned on money and love. Elsa Plaza’s Desmontando el caso de la vampira del Raval, published by Icaria, reconstructs the case from press reports and court records. Barcelona Metropolitan quotes her central question: how could a single abduction lead to accusations of serial crimes without a single body being found?
The story of her death needed its own correction. Newspapers and later retellings said that other prisoners beat her to death in the prison yard. elDiario.es, in its 2015 report on Corominas’s book, still repeats that fellow inmates lynched her, while noting that the press never settled whether she died from a beating or from cancer. Patricia Melgar’s review records Plaza’s conclusion that the lynching never happened and that she died of illness; 3Cat, betevé and Nació Digital attribute the death to uterine cancer, and Barcelona Metropolitan reports that her death certificate gives that cause. Her body went to a common plot on Montjuïc, where, betevé reports, the popular version of her death circulates alongside stories of her ghost. One point stays open. Several outlets state that she was never tried. Melgar’s review states that she was tried and convicted in one older, separate case, on other charges, and sentenced to one year and eight months in prison, and that no evidence ever charged her with murder.
Sergei Golovkin killed 11 boys in the countryside west and north of Moscow between April 1986 and September 1992. The youngest was 10 and the oldest 16. He was a graduate of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in Moscow and a livestock specialist at Moscow Horse Plant No. 1, a stud farm for Orlov trotters in the Odintsovo district, where colleagues knew him as withdrawn and awkward and where he had received a silver medal from the national exhibition of economic achievements for his work. He was convicted of murder, with other charges, in 11 cases.
For years the police were looking for someone else. After the death of Andrei Gulyaev, 14, in July 1986, a teenager who said he was the dead boy’s friend told police about a man with a tattoo of a dagger wrapped in a snake and the word "Fisher." Police searched for the tattooed man for years; it later emerged that the boy had invented him, the news channel 360 reported. Moskvich Mag traced the name itself to the 1972 world chess championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, and wrote that rumor, a witness description and a parody song spread it among local children. Golovkin later used the name himself.
The false lead did not work alone. Moskvich Mag’s 2026 account says the crimes were alike but were not linked for a long time, and that officials were reluctant to accept that a serial killer was at work near the government dachas around Nikolina Gora. Golovkin was arrested on October 19, 1992, near Zhavoronki.
Two more stories grew around the sentence. A rumor spread that Boris Yeltsin refused clemency because Golovkin’s garage stood about 500 meters from the president’s dacha, and 360 repeated the distance. Moskvich Mag’s 2023 account rejected it, noting that Yeltsin also refused clemency to other condemned men with no link to the area, among them Valery Asratyan, and pointed to local anger and a decision to clear death row before executions stopped. Reports differ on whether Yeltsin refused clemency in late November 1995 or in a review in April 1996.
The second story is that he was the last man executed in Russia. Pravo.ru wrote that Golovkin was the last man executed at Butyrka but that the last execution in Russia took place on September 2, 1996, and that the name of the man shot that day was not public. A former death-row prisoner interviewed for Snob in 2021 also dated it to September 2. Most reports give August 2, 1996, as the date Golovkin was shot. Moskvich Mag’s Alexei Baykov called the claim that he was the very last probably a legend, without ruling it out.
Eight myths, eight different origins. A Jesuit’s moral parable and a serialized novel of 1932. Pulp magazines, a 1974 novel and a best seller written for the general reader. A boy talking to police, a newspaper’s first week of coverage and a tour guide in Charleston. In every case a date can be put on the first appearance of the false version, and in every case the correction came later and quieter. The record can be summarized in a paragraph for each person: a countess who was never tried, a woman hanged for robbery, a swindler hanged for one murder, a man hanged for one of dozens of attributed deaths, a thief who was no gentleman, a Texan whose pool was drained, a woman who died of illness before trial, a farm specialist whose name was not Fisher.
• 1610: royal investigation of Elizabeth Báthory; 327 witnesses give statements.
• December 29, 1610: Báthory seized at Čachtice.
• January 1611: her servants tried at Bytča.
• August 21, 1614: Báthory dies at Čachtice Castle.
• 1729: Turóczi’s history of Hungary prints the first blood-bath story.
• February 18, 1819: sheriff and a mob raid the Six Mile House; the Fishers are arrested.
• May 1819: Lavinia and John Fisher convicted of highway robbery.
• February 18, 1820: the Fishers hanged in Charleston.
• July and August 1895: Chicago newspapers report on the building; several reports are later disproved.
• November 1895: Holmes convicted of the murder of Benjamin Pitezel.
• May 7, 1896: Holmes hanged at Moyamensing Prison.
• February 27, 1912: the missing Barcelona girl turns up alive; Enriqueta Martí arrested.
• May 12, 1913: Martí dies in prison.
• 1925 to 1927: Martin Lecián’s thefts in Moravia; March 8, 1927, gendarme killed; April 24, 1927, arrested.
• June 15, 1927: Earle Nelson arrested in Manitoba.
• October 6, 1927: Lecián hanged at Olomouc.
• January 13, 1928: Nelson hanged in Winnipeg.
• September 24, 1938: Joe Ball dies; Wheeler’s account leads to the recovery of Minnie Gotthardt’s body on October 14.
• 1986 to 1992: the Moscow Oblast killings of 11 boys.
• October 19, 1992: Golovkin arrested.
• August 2, 1996: Golovkin shot at Butyrka (most reports).
• May 2017: Holmes’s plot opened; tests confirm the man inside.