Criminal - A New Kind of Life

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

In 1930, a Cuban woman named Elena de Hoyos went to the hospital in Key West, Florida. She had a bad cough, and her family was afraid she had Tuberculosis. She met a German x-ray technician named Carl Von Cosel who claimed he could save her, using unusual methods he’d invented himself. But on October 25, 1931, Elena de Hoyos died. “Count Von Cosel,” as he called himself, wrote that a strange new kind of life began for him. For more, check out Ben Harrison’s book, Undying Love. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. In 1930, a Cuban woman named Elena de Hoyos walked into Key West Marine Hospital with a bad cough. Criminal co-creator, Lauren Spohr. She was 20 years old and her family was terrified that she had tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was the number one killer at the family was terrified that she had tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was the number one killer at the time. It was called hasty consumption. And it was very deadly. It didn't take long, probably three to four weeks, generally.

And there was no cure. And everyone was just frightened to death of it. The doctor at the hospital ordered a blood test and a chest X-ray. The X-ray technician was a 53-year-old German man named Karl von Kossel. He's ecstatic to take her X-ray. And then he's horrified when he sees the results because he wants her to live. He wants to be her suitor. After that first meeting, Carl von Kossel wrote that he didn't know what to do with himself. He couldn't believe that this woman was real. She was perfect. And the x-rays did show that

she had tuberculosis. He decides right then and there that he is going to be the one who's going to make medical history. He is the one who's going to be her savior, and no one else can do it. We're hearing the story from Ben Harrison. He's been researching Carl von Kossel for more than 20 years. Von Kossel arrived in Key West in 1927 from Dresden, Germany, where he said he'd grown up in a castle. His real name was Karl Tonsler, but he asked everyone in Key West to call him Count von Kassel. He was married, but he'd left his wife behind in Germany. When he got to Florida, he sent her a small painting.

On the back, he'd written, Happy Birthday. And underneath that, he wrote, It's a different world in Florida. And then it seems that he forgot all about her. Von Kossel claimed to have nine university degrees. He said he was a radiologist. He also said he was an important inventor who specialized in electricity. He said he'd been high up in the German military, that he'd been the captain of a submarine. He said he was a pilot. He was building

an airplane from scratch behind Key West Marine Hospital. His airplane was, I mean, this exemplifies Von Kossel. He was a grand inventor in his own mind. And he could convince people that this pile of junk was going to fly someday. A lot of what Ben Harrison has been trying to figure out is how many of Von Kossel's claims were true, tracking down birth certificates, marriage certificates, his military service records, pension checks. Whoever this guy was, he did have the skills to walk into an American military hospital and get a job as an X-ray technician. I think he was a real good talker.

And in fact, I know he was a real good talker. And in fact, I know he was a real good talker. And he obviously knew enough to convince people that he could do the job. Ben Harrison says it didn't hurt that Von Kossel arrived in Key West with money. He had enough money to buy land, and he started to build a house. It was a depression. And here in 35, the railroad was destroyed by the hurricane. So Key West was totally isolated. And so anybody with any money was wealthy. family that he wanted to save her using methods that he'd invented at no charge, they said all right. His main method was to electrocute her. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Von Kossel brought over an electrical coil with brass handles and taught Elena how to regulate the current when he wasn't there.

He said it wouldn't hurt at all. He said it would feel like a warm bath. He did everything he possibly could to save her. He made these Frankenstein-ish globes, and all he did was just shock her. He said the electricity would slow down the growth of tubercular bacteria. Sometimes when he shocked her, sparks went flying off of her body. Sometimes his devices would short and take out the power in Elena's parents' house. Her parents didn't know what to make of him, but they could see that whatever he was doing,

he was working incredibly hard to save their daughter. He was at their house every single day. He would sit next to her bed, and he would tell her that he was going to save her, and then he was going to marry her, and that they would fly off together in the airplane he was building for them. She had no interest in him whatsoever. She was horrified that she was this ill, nobody has any cure for her, this crazy doctor's chasing her around, telling her how much he loves her.

So, no, she was not smitten with him at all. On October 25, 1931, Elena de Hoyos died. Von Kossel was devastated that he'd failed to save her. He offered to pay for the funeral. He wanted to pay for everything. He picked out her coffin. He chose the flowers. She was buried in the Key West Cemetery.

Von Kossel began to visit the cemetery every single day. The more time he spent there, the more he worried about the rain. He worried her grave might flood. Neighbors later reported watching him crawl around on his hands and knees, trying to completely cover her grave with a tarp. And then they said they watched him decorate the tarp with flowers. He could not stand the thought of the groundwater, the reaction her body would have to that.

And so he decided that she needed an above-ground mausoleum. Von Kossel got permission from her family and from the city to begin construction on an above-ground mausoleum. But to build it, they needed to dig up her coffin. They put the coffin in the funeral home to wait until the mausoleum was complete. Von Kossel couldn't resist going to see her. When he got there, he quietly paid the funeral home director to go away. And then he opened the lid of the casket. He couldn't stand to see her like that. He thought he should fix it.

He paid the funeral director to give him regular access to Elena's coffin at night. When he finished his work at the hospital every day, he'd go to the funeral home and work all night. He wanted to invent a better way to embalm her so she could still look beautiful. He put her body into an incubation tank full of something that he called a nourishing solution. Which was real spooky. And then, Von Kossel put her into a clean new coffin, one he'd specially designed for her. It had two valves, one valve for filling the tank and one valve for draining it. When construction on the mausoleum was complete, von Kossel sealed Elena's coffin with a hundred screws. He said the mausoleum was Elena's new little house. He visited every evening, bringing flowers.

He would take naps there. He ate his dinner there, sitting in a small chair and talking to her. He talked to her constantly. And after a while, he said, she started to talk back. He said that when he put his ear up to the casket valves, he could hear her speaking. He figured that if she was speaking, she must not be dead. And if she wasn't dead, she didn't belong in the cemetery. Von Kossel wrote that a strange new kind of life began for him.

One night, in the middle of the night, he dragged her casket out of the cemetery. He said that part was easy. He said it was so easy, he felt he was being helped along by, quote, friendly hands reaching out of the ground. But when he tried to get the casket up and over the cemetery fence, he ran into a problem with some leaking. And he's worn his nicest clothes. This is a very ceremonial evening for him. And this foul odor starts overwhelming him and coming from this casket.

He hid the casket in the back of his airplane. On the wing, he'd painted Countess Elena von Kossel. And then, when it was safe, he opened her coffin for a second time. This was two years. She'd been dead for two years. So what he saw must have been just awful. You know, as bad as you could imagine it. And he took all the nasty cloth and junk out of her casket and threw it in the ocean and put a bunch of fresh stuff on her. The owner of the local grocery store remembered that Von Kossel would come in and buy six bars of soap every single day. He fed her vitamins.

He put splints on her nose. He remade her skin with layers of silk and layers of wax. And so that's how she was rebuilt. Mummified, if you want to call it that. In her casket, one of her arms had been folded over her chest. To straighten it out again, he attached a cord to her wrist and ran the cord through a pulley he attached to the ceiling. He said she got more lifelike every single day. He bought a small house near the ocean for the two of them.

At night, he played the organ for her. Beethoven, Bach, Wagner. Years passed like this. They celebrated Christmases. He decorated a tree and poured wine into her mouth. He bought her a wedding dress. Von Kossel wrote that he could sometimes see her breathing very slightly.

He says that's how he knew he was doing the right thing. He said sometimes she would look right at him, quote, straight and seriously. But Key West is a small town. You're not going to keep a secret that long. That big that long. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.

His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers

to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Nothing's kept a secret in Key West forever, unless one person knows it. It was going to come out. And it's a wonder it didn't come out sooner. After Carl von Kossel stole the body of Elena De Hoyos and brought her to his house, he forgot to do something very important, something he'd been doing every day for years.

Go visit Elena's grave at the Key West Cemetery. People noticed. Elena's family in particular noticed. The mausoleum he'd built for her had become overgrown. No one was maintaining it. Elena's sister found this very odd. She later told police that she knew her sister wasn't in there. She said she just had a bad feeling. Elena's sister asked Von Kossel to meet her at the cemetery. She got very forceful with him and said, I'll go crazy if you don't let me open that casket in that mausoleum. And according to his memoirs, he said,

I don't want you to go crazy, so come with me to my house. And so he took her to his house and showed her the body. When the police arrived, Boncastle cooperated completely. He didn't think he had anything to hide. When the police arrived, Von Kossel cooperated completely. He didn't think he had anything to hide. He showed them to Elena in the bed where they slept every night. She was wearing gold bracelets and a blue silk robe. Von Kossel told the police that he understood perfectly well that Elena had died nine years earlier.

He explained that she was there because he planned to bring her back to life. Just as soon as he figured out how. They were very sympathetic to him. And this wasn't a big city police force going to a house they knew nothing about and just heard about this guy. This was a, everybody knew everybody. And they knew, the sheriff knew the count. And so he was saying, look, we're going to treat you the best we can. We're going to take care of the body. We're going to have Lopez funeral

home. Come pick up the body. We're going to take it there. It's going to be safe. We're going to treat you fairly. Nobody wanted to be mean to him. They just didn't. That wasn't the way people felt. Everyone agreed that the case was bizarre. But a lot of people said that von Kossel had not committed a crime. Some people said he was just trying to be helpful. And that all things considered, he'd done a, quote, excellent job. He wasn't taking a dead girl from the grave. He was trying to resurrect a dead person.

And that's where the overwhelming sentiment in his favor came from. Letters were coming in from all over the country and the world on the eve of World War II. And the gist of these letters was, here in a world that is hell-bent on destroying itself, on killing thousands of people, here's one man trying to bring somebody back to life, and even if he fails, if the odds are a million to one, at least he's tried. Von Kossel was arrested and charged with malicious and wanton disfigurement of a burial vault. One of the best lawyers in the state of Florida came forward and offered to defend him free of charge.

Elena's body was taken back to the funeral home and put on display. Nearly 7,000 people came to see it. According to the Key West Citizen, relatives said that Elena looked, quote, surprisingly like she did in real life. One visitor told reporters that her skin felt soft, quote, just like if I touched your arm right now. Carl von Kossel went before a judge and said he'd made a promise to take care of Elena no matter what. The judge was at a loss. He didn't even know what kind of crime this was.

He asked two doctors and his own secretary to evaluate Von Kossel's mental health in what was then called a lunacy commission. The two doctors and the secretary came back and said that Von Kossel seemed perfectly fine. A lawyer for the county said there was nothing wrong with his mind at all. The only problem was that, quote, his love for the girl had got the best of him. The judge asked some other judges for advice, and in the end decided just to do nothing. They just didn't see anybody really that hurt other than the feelings of her family. That was the injured party. I think they just decided that the statute

of limitations had run and let's be done with it. Von Kossel was free to go. The Key West police had to figure out a way to reinter Elena so that she could never be disturbed again. Only three officers were allowed to know where she was eventually buried, and they never told anyone. All three died keeping the secret. Von Kossel told a reporter for the Miami Herald that it didn't seem fair that Elena would be buried, quote, after all of my work. He died in 1952 when he was 75 years old.

After he died, the Associated Press reported that police found a wax replica of Elena's body in his home. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nydia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Robertson is our assistant producer. Audio mix by Johnny Vince Evans. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where you've got a link to Ben Harrison's book, Undying Love. Special thanks to Helen Harrison and Melinda K. Hall. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

We're a proud member of Radio... Stop, Lauren. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines,

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