Of all the weird crimes that can take place, incest has to be one of the most perversely interesting. And if incest is intriguing on its own, and murders always hold a morbid appeal, incest and murder stories are a double whammy of the downright captivating.
Considering the unstable environment created by acts of incest, it's not altogether that surprising when murder follows behind. Sometimes, incest results in murder as a way to cover up the evidence. Sometimes, it's a crazy sex cult gone wrong. Whatever the circumstances, it makes for a lurid story.
And the stories are as varied as you can imagine, from tragic cases of rape and murder to tales of sophisticated socialites and ancient queens to mysterious cults and unsolved murders.
Barbara Daly Baekeland, a glamorous American socialite and actress, may seem an unlikely person to have gotten involved in a case of invest and murder. Born in 1922, she found success as a model, even appearing in Vogue. After her divorce, her son Antony lived with her. They both suffered from severe mental illness, and when Barbara found out her son was sexually involved with a man, she tried to "cure" him.
When hiring prostitutes didn't cure his homosexuality, she convinced him to have sex with her in an another attempt. Antony didn't handle it well, unsurprisingly. In 1972, the then-25-year-old Antony killed his mother with a kitchen knife, after which he is said to have ordered Chinese food. After his release from an institution, he stabbed his grandmother, though she survived; later, he killed himself by suffocation.
In 1922, five members of the Gruber family and their maid, Maria Baumgartner, were all found slaughtered in Germany, in a case that still remains unsolved. The father of the family, Andreas, was found to have been abusive to his children. Josef, a baby who was murdered, was discovered to be the result of incest with his daughter Viktoria.
Most of the bodies were found piled in the barn covered in hay, and theories abound as to what happened in this gruesome murder. One suspect was Lorenz Schlittenbauer, a suitor of Viktoria's, who it was thought may have lashed out in jealousy because of the incest - but this is only one of many theories, including a random burglary or even demonic intervention.
Between 1967 and 1987, Fred West committed at least a dozen murders in England, most of them with his second wife Rosemary (who had been sexually abused by her own father). Together they tortured, raped, and killed young women before dismembering them and burying the bodies. Fred raped his daughter Anne-Marie, until she eventually escaped, and then he turned his sexual abuse to his daughter Heather.
Killer Marcus Wesson was found guilty of the deaths of many of his children and grandchildren. Nine children were killed in all, aged one to 25. Their bodies were found in a pile, each having been shot through the eye, after a stand-off with police. Wesson had bred and raised a clan of children through incest, isolating them from the outside world, and confiscating any money they made.
There was some debate as to whether he had shot them all or if Sebhrenah Wesson, the eldest, had killed herself and the others. (It was said that the father had trained the children to kill one another if needed.) Despite that lack of clarity, Marcus was found guilty even though the government fell short of proving he pulled the trigger.
Eddie Lee Sexton
Eddie Lee Sexton "controlled his children with years of incest and horrific abuse." A self-avowed Satanist who treated his family like a cult, Sexton forced his children to murder for him in a display of power. His daughter smothered her own infant because he told her to, and one of his sons killed his son-in-law, Joel Good, by strangling him with a rope. Sexton was found more guilty than his mentally disabled son, whom Sexton he had used to kill Good.
Rick and his wife Gail Brink had already been dead for two days when Rick was found in his car shot twice and Gail, in their Michigan home, shot three times. Following years of investigation, the case went cold, until a disturbing twist in 2013. Gail's brother, Ryan Wyngarden, was arrested after his wife told police he had confessed to her back in 1987 that he had murdered Gail and Rick. The reason?
He and his sister Gail had had an incestuous relationship in their teens, and a mixture of jealousy and fear that Gail would tell their secret had fueled the murders. Wyngarden was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder.
