Why Would a Killer Bury Bodies in the Yard?

Source: Art by K. Ramsland

One night in early May, a woman cried out from a residence in Chalchuapa, El Salvador, and rushed out to plead for help. Police arrived too late. Inside, they discovered two corpses – Jackeline Cristina Palomo Lima, who’d tried to flee, and her mother. Two male bodies, including Lima’s brother, were in the septic tank. Yet this was the tip of the iceberg. In the backyard, several pits contained 12 bodies of women and girls, including a 2-year-old. Some were skeletal, suggesting murders dating back two years.

A former member of the National Civil Police, Hugo Osorio Chávez, was charged and arrest warrants were issued for accomplices in a murder ring that targeted mostly women. Chavez had been convicted and imprisoned for five years for his sexual contact with a minor. He’s suspected of taking payments on the promise of transporting people out of the country but killing them instead. His alleged MO was to lure victims via social media by offering them the American dream. Apparently, he had no better place to store the remains, so he left them in the house. Several reports say there are more remains, with excavation work continuing.

During the same week, former butcher and suspected serial killer Andres Mendoza, 72, was arrested when female remains were found at his home in Mexico City. “We have unfortunately found different human remains, bones, women's clothing, voter IDs, and other things that lead us to presume that he could be a serial killer of women,” said the city’s special prosecutor. Investigators had exhumed more than 3,700 bone fragments from an estimated 17 people. One source says Mendoza admitted to eating body parts, peeling off skin, and videotaping the murders. So far, he’s been charged with killing and dismembering the 34-year-old wife of a police commander who broke into the suspect’s home and found her remains.

In another post, I discussed the wilderness areas that serial killers have favored for victim disposal. However, it’s clear that some prefer to keep them close, whether for lack of a better plan, for their value as a reminder of the excitement of violence, or for greater control over the bodies. Some who grow up lonely simply want company, even a corpse. Some prefer a corpse because it doesn’t reject them or get up to leave. These predators have in common a high tolerance for the smell of death, handling bodies and body parts, and being in the presence of maggots and decomposing flesh.

John Wayne Gacy comes to mind, as does Dennis Nilsen, Dorothea Puente, and John Christie, although Christie also “stored” his murder victims in sealed cupboards or under floorboards. Nilsen was a committed necrophile, while the others were being more or less practical (or paranoid), as was Hugo Selenksi.

He “hid” five bodies in his backyard in northeastern Pennsylvania. He was convicted in the strangling death of two people – a pharmacist who’d been running a lucrative prescription drug ring and his girlfriend. A pair of drug dealers was also buried in the yard. The fifth body was not publicly identified.

Lesser known is Cletus Paul Reese. He lived on a farm in western Coshocton County, Ohio. In 1954, car salesman Clyde Patton brought a new car over to show him and vanished. Reese had been institutionalized for psychotic behavior but was back on the farm, a reclusive loner whom neighbors thought was strange (shades of Ed Gein!). When Reese’s sister saw the car, she asked the sheriff to investigate. They found Patton’s body, fatally bludgeoned and buried on the farm. A search party located another decomposed, bludgeoned body in a grave near Reese’s house. He’d been a patient where Reese had been treated. Then a third man’s corpse was found. When nearly a thousand people turned out to search for more bodies, going well beyond the farm grounds, Reese finally admitted to the murders and said there were only three. He was returned to a psychiatric institution while his farm became infamous as “Murder Ridge.”

Similarly, during the 1880s, the reclusive bachelor Eugene Butler hired several young men to work around his North Dakota farm. One by one, they disappeared. He started hallucinating and acting out in such startling ways that he was finally locked up. After he died in the facility, his house was razed. That’s when people discovered the missing farmhands. Six bodies were buried in the crawl space under the house. All had been bludgeoned to death, and two had broken legs. Butler had done little to avoid the stench. Since he offered no confession, it remains unclear whether he killed the men for profit or sport, or due to one of his paranoid delusions. Likely the latter. He could have buried them anywhere on his nearly 500-acre farm, far from the house, but clearly, he wanted to keep them close. Very close.