How terrifying scientist Doctor Death created ‘corpse bride’ in twisted experiment & lived with her for seven years
LIKE something out of a twisted gothic horror story, “Dr Death” Carl Tanzler set out to create his very own corpse bride.
He stole the body of a young patient of his from her grave and carried out twisted experiments on her remains in a bid to bring her back to life.
The creepy scientist – also known as Florida‘s Frankenstein – preserved the body, replaced her eyes with glass and her face with a mask.
He lived with his “bride” for seven years until his vile crimes were discovered by her family and the police.
Haunted by visions of “ghosts”, Tanzler was convinced the dead woman – Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos – was his one true love.
Dr Death was born almost exactly 146 years ago – and his grisly actions are still as horrifying then as they are now.
It is one of the most grisly true crime stories of the 20th century, but he was never prosecuted due to a legal loophole.
Her family was horrified when they eventually discovered the “monster” that Elena had been turned into by Carl.
Elena’s sister told the court: “It was the most grotesque thing I have ever seen in my life.”
And yet the deluded doctor insisted he was a doting lover, not a twisted grave-robbing maniac.
Originally, German-born Carl was introduced to 21-year-old Elena when she was his patient at a hospital in Key West, Florida.
She suffered from tuberculosis and he developed an obsession.
He became convinced she was the incarnation of a ghost he claimed had visited him when he was a boy.
Born in Dresden in 1877, Carl moved to America after World War 1 where he went by the name Count Carl von Cosel.
He claimed to have nine different university degrees and said he had grown up in a castle.
But despite his delusions of grandeur and supreme intellect, in reality, he was a sad, twisted, and deluded man.
He claimed that when he was 12 he was visited by the ghost of one of his female ancestors, who “showed him his future bride”.
The spirit told him: “Here, Carl, I have brought you the bride that one day you will meet.”
Carl said his ghost bride remained with him for seven days, standing at the foot of his bed while he slept, before she vanished.
Distraught, Carl vowed that he would see her again.
After serving in WWI for Germany, during which he was taken as a PoW by the Australian army, Carl went back to Germany and married 18-year-old Doris Anna Schaefer.
Trembling with burning love, I sank gently into the coffin with her and kissed her as if she were alive
Carl Tanzler
However, she wasn’t the ghost woman who had appeared in front of him.
So, despite having two children together, in the 1920s Carl abandoned his family and moved to Tampa, Florida to begin a new life.
Here, he called himself a doctor, despite never completing his training at Leipzig University in his native Germany.
His family moved over to join him in the US the following year, but Carl moved again, to Key West at the southernmost tip of Florida, where he got a job as an attendant at the Navy Marine Hospital.
It was here while working as a technician that Carl met Elena, the daughter of Cuban immigrants whose father worked at a factory making cigars.
When Carl first laid eyes on Elena, he convinced himself that she was the woman the ghost had promised to him.
He later wrote: “I looked into a face of unearthly beauty, the face of the bride which had been promised to me by my ancestor 40 years before.”
Elena married her first husband at the age of 18, but he cruelly left her for another woman after she had a miscarriage.
Her health deteriorated and she developed a cough, which later became tuberculosis.
Carl became obsessed with Elena and began treating her for free, giving her radiation treatments and X-rays, and bringing her fruit and “medicinal wine”.
Her desperate family, who couldn’t afford to pay expensive hospital costs, even let him move into their small home to continue his “treatment”.
But they grew suspicious when Elena’s health continued to worsen, and their suspicions were confirmed when Carl began proposing marriage to his patient.
Soon the family ordered Carl to stay away, although he continued to send her “love letters”
But as Elena became even sicker, Carl managed to talk his way back into living in the family’s house.
In October 1931, Elena died, aged just 22.
Carl paid for the funeral, selected the coffin, and sat beside her grave every day.
He decided to build a grand mausoleum for Elena to stop her body from “getting wet”.
Even more sinisterly, he moved into Elena’s old room, renting it off her parents for five dollars a month.
“It still preserved the sweet scent of her hair,” he said.
Carl got a new coffin made, including a metal outer sarcophagus, and moved Elena into the stone mausoleum.
For 18 months, he visited Elena’s grave every day, until one night, he claimed to hear a voice coming from inside the mausoleum.
He said that Elena was singing to him, telling him to remove her body from the cemetery.
One night, Carl returned in a wedding suit with a waggon and rope and ransacked poor Elena’s grave.
He removed the inner coffin but left the outer sarcophagus, to avoid suspicion.
Carl took the body back to a house he was renting and washed it in whisky.
Then, he moved it again, this time to an old plane he was restoring on the grounds of the hospital where he worked, which he had named “La Contessa de Cosel” in honour of his dead bride.
By this point, Elena had been dead for two years and her eyes were rotten and sunken.
She had maggots crawling over her body, and her clothes were covered in a slimy mould.
Crackpot Carl washed Elena’s body and applied perfume, buying glass eyes and dressing her in a wedding dress.
He later said of the experience: “Trembling with burning love, I sank gently into the coffin with her and kissed her as if she were alive.
“Words cannot express the heavenly bliss that we were experiencing.”
Such was his twisted obsession, Carl didn’t even bother to attend his own daughter’s funeral in 1934.
The following year, Carl lost his job at the hospital due to budget cuts.
He could no longer afford the electricity costs needed to run the incubator he was using to preserve Elena’s body, so he slept with her in the bed of his rented house.
“Now I slept by her side to be close to her and to protect her from insects and other dangers as if I could feel it for her,” he wrote.
“Whenever I discovered another leakage, I sealed it up right away with silk and wax to stop any plasma from running away.”
Carl’s despicable crimes may never have come to light if it wasn’t for the persistence of Elena’s sister.
Since 1940, she had been Elena’s only remaining living relative, and she had heard rumours that her late sister wasn’t in her tomb.
As Carl was the only person who had keys to the mausoleum, she confronted him at his house.
Eventually, Carl peeled back a curtain to reveal a site of true horror – Elena’s body lying in the bed.
Carl, by now 70, was arrested and charged with wanton and maliciously demolishing, disfiguring, and destroying a grave.
Elena’s sister told the court: “She had glass eyes, her arms and legs were like sticks with stockings, it was a monster, it was horrible. What I saw will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
Poor Elena’s body was displayed in a local funeral home in the death mask Carl had made for her, where thousands came to see her.
But in court, Carl portrayed himself as a devoted lover and insisted he had brought Elena back to life.
And he is believed to have engaged in necrophilia with her remains.
But this didn’t stop the press and public from describing their story as one of doomed romance, and not twisted perversions.
He bizarrely even had female admirers who came to meet him in jail.
Carl avoided jail for his crimes after the state decided not to prosecute him due to the two-year statute of limitations.
Elena’s body was dismembered and buried in a small cube, with the gravediggers never revealing where they had interred her remains.
Carl for his part moved into a small house in 1944, keeping his plane in the garden outside and charging visitors a quarter each to visit “Dr Von Cosel’s Laboratory”.
He kept Elena’s casket on his dining room table, complete with a model of her body and a death mask.
Carl was found dead in his home in 1952, aged 75.
In total, he lived with Elena’s corpse for seven years.